


la vie est ailleurs

by syzygysm



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Kink Meme, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-08
Updated: 2011-08-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 04:10:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syzygysm/pseuds/syzygysm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I want, she thinks, and that’s the problem with wanting, because it’s limitless as a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is stolen from Milan Kundera with my deepest apologies.
> 
> And, especially, thank you: to dialectical for the amazing beta/therapy, because for me they're one and the same; to rufflefeather for pretending that she enjoyed me rambling on about this fic to her; to maybelater__ for her unflagging support; and to arinna05, who titled this and is basically the reason I write anything ever

“Where did you even _find_ him,” Mal says finally.

Dom looks a little crazy-eyed, the hours of jetlag racking up for him like pennies in a piggy bank.

“London,” he admits, and flashes her a quiet smile. “He tried to pick my pocket.”

“So, of course you thought,” Mal says, “that you should invite him to _live with us._ ”

“Something like that,” Dom says, but he’s grinning and Mal wants to tell him that he is absolutely crazy, the way he goes to London even though she could swear that the boarding pass had been for a plane bound for Los Angeles; the way that he wakes her up at three o’clock in the morning to go dreaming in Marrakesh, kissing her carefully in the spice markets; the way he stays up for hours on end, scrawling out differential equations, bending physics, the way he makes theoretical mathematics sound like fairytales.

“Mal,” Dom says, and she thinks, how young we are, how foolish we are, the way we spend these precious hours of our life in sleep, wanting more than we should when we already have so much. But Dom is all lit up, the kitchen lights dusting him in muted gold: “I took him dreaming.”

“You—”

“Mal,” Dom says, and if she weren’t so cross right now, she’d kiss him, the shape of her name, there. “Remember what we were talking about last month? About the dreamers _themselves_ assuming different shapes in the dreams? Do you remember? You were building Paris and you said—”

“Yes,” Mal says, slow. “Yes, but we tried it and I couldn’t even – what are you saying?”

“He can do it,” Dom says, hushed as a secret. “Mal, he can _forge_.”

“Him?” says Mal, and she thinks about the kid sitting on her couch, thinks about the frayed sleeves on his hoodie, rolled up to reveal the pale press of a wrist, the surprisingly delicate lacework of bluish veins. She thinks about the way the neck of his tee shirt stretches, too big on him, skims across a sharp collarbone, and the harsh spit of his consonants. She thinks about the way he’d looked at Dom, quiet and watchful, like a lion pretending to be a house cat, his claws carefully folded away. And she wonders what his dreams are like, how beautiful they must have been for Dom to bring him here, wonders what he looks like when he smiles, whether his eyes go bright, wonders what it must be like to be sixteen and lost among London’s wandering streets, knowing only the knife-edge of hunger and the echoing emptiness of desperation.

Mal says, “I’ll go make up the guest bedroom.”

 

+

 

His name is Eames, he tells her.

“That’s – really quite horrible,” she says, honest, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She’s stripping the sheets off the guest bed, changing out the lily-pink pattern – a holdover from two years of dorm-living in college – for plain white. Eames has folded himself into the armchair that Dom had begged off his parents last month and he’s got his hood tucked close around his face, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He hasn’t offered to help, hasn’t said much anything at all, save for a vaguely horrified, “Really?” when Mal had shown him the room with its pink sheets and soft yellow walls.

God, Mal thinks, tucking in the fitted sheet – teenage boys are such little shits.

“It’s my name,” Eames says, defensive. His voice is a shade deeper than she would have expected; Mal remembers being sixteen, remembers blankets of hyacinths and sun-bare legs and filmy, too-short skirts, and thinks that it’s sad for Eames, because all sixteen means to him is that people are less willing to give you food because you don’t look like a sad, scrawny little child anymore; sixteen means gangs and learning to pick locks and pockets, means bruises when people decide they don’t like the way you talk.

“What?” Eames says coldly, and Mal startles a bit, realizes she’s been staring at him.

“Nothing,” she says, reflexive, and looks at the pillowcase in her hands. “Just – Dom said you can forge.”

Eames looks at her, blank, and then shrugs, ducks his head. “Yeah.”

“That’s – amazing,” says Mal, and she wonders what this boy who looks years older than sixteen, with his rasp-rough voice and a middle finger that looks like it’s been professionally broken and unprofessionally healed, becomes in dreams, wonders who it is he wants to be. She wonders if his dreams are as beautiful as Dom says, and if they are, where he’d learned what beauty is, because it’s nowhere to be found right now, certainly not in the grime that has settled, cake-thick, into the lines of his palm and underneath his fingernails, or in the ugly spider web of a scar that might’ve once been an uglier knife wound..

“I don’t know anyone else who can do that,” Mal says. “We didn’t even know what it was _called_ until a few weeks ago.”

“Yeah,” says Eames, casual. “Yeah – Cobb said that.”

“Right,” Mal says. “Well, we’re – we’re pretty excited about you.”

Eames doesn’t say anything, just fusses with his hoodie a bit, tugs it lower over his forehead, proceeds to ignore her completely, and part of Mal wants to ask if this means she’s dismissed. She doesn’t, though, can already hear the fight she’ll have with Dom about this a few weeks from now, because how long is Eames going to be living with them, and can they _actually_ afford the extra plane ticket from London back to the States, can Dom just be _practical_ for one second, and no, Mal can’t just _be_ in the moment, because, look, Dom, these bills? You can’t pay them with dreams.

What she says instead is, “I think you’re set, I should – probably be getting to bed. Um, I set aside a toothbrush and a towel for you in the bathroom just – right down there – and you’re welcome to anything in the kitchen, no need to ask.” She waits, but Eames just mutters, “Yeah, all right,” and Mal wonders if Dom was like this at sixteen, but, no, she can’t imagine Dom without his shy smile, a streak of ink across his nose, his cheek warm under her palm.

She’s about to close the door behind her when Eames says, “Thanks,” and she turns, surprised. He’s standing in the middle of the room and he’s taken the hood off; he looks too big for the room, she thinks, and somehow too small for it at the same time, looks like he’s unsure about the width of his shoulders, a growth spurt that probably came about all too fast. He’s gone faintly pink, and Mal thinks, _oh_ , because – because his hair needs a cut, is darker than she would’ve guessed but will probably bleach out under the summer sun. His lashes are long, longer than they have any right to be, and – _sixteen_ , she thinks, this is what sixteen should look like, a little awkward and a little beautiful.

“Hey,” she says, and leans against the doorframe. “Will you come dreaming with me tomorrow?”

And Mal gets the answer to her earlier question, because, yes, Eames’ eyes do go bright when he smiles.

 

+

 

They go dreaming.

Mal sketches New York, the skyline just a thin trembling line, the skyscrapers perfect columns of glass and metal, spires that dwindle into the sky. Her New York is quieter than Dom’s: Dom’s is always glossy with the night, all neon colors, a kaleidoscope of fluorescent greens and shocking pinks. Dom likes the loudness of it all, a woman’s laughter hanging, high-pitched, over the thrum of traffic; he likes the faint trace of smoke, the shit-stained corners, likes the way three o’clock in the morning is lit up bright as day.

Mal’s New York, though, skims over the details, the gothic arches of that building, the art deco inset of this one. Her New York is set in the fading tendrils of spring, lush greens and cherry blossoms, soft shoulders, when April blurs into May. Her New York is like a silhouette of Dom’s, the harsh noises muted, the colors hazy, because Mal likes dreams to be dreams, likes to know for certain when she’s dreaming and when she’s not. Mal’s New York is not really New York at all, Dom tells her, sprawled on his back in the grass, face tilted up to the sun.

“My New York is better,” Mal says, and looks at Eames, who is standing quietly in the sunshine.

She remembers her first time dreaming, remembers the thrill of it, the way it had set shocks into her blood, running hot right under the surface of her skin. Dom had taken her to Istanbul, first, and they watched the city burn with the sunrise, red-golds and blues so bright that it’d made their eyes hurt. And then they’d skipped across the world: Rome with its marbled columns and crumbling gods, Cairo with its golden desert that stretched out until it met the skies, just a thin seam of horizon. She remembers the first time she’d woken up in a dream, the way she’d clutched at Dom’s hand, the way the terror had curled around her heart, had squeezed, greedy, and she remembers the way it had fallen away, remembers the heavy promise of wine and laughter and Dom, the way dreaming had felt more like being alive than anything else.

She thinks it must be so much more than that for Eames, who’d been silent through breakfast that morning, had dragged his chair closer to Dom’s, had taken his coffee black like Dom took it, even though she privately suspects that he’d prefer it with sugar and cream. Eames, she thinks, who’d followed Dom across an ocean, chasing after these blue skies and green hills that roll on forever, because all reality had offered him was that constant edge of fear, blades sharpened until they gleamed.

“Build with me,” she says to Eames, and he looks surprised, so she clarifies, “fill in my spaces.”

Because she has left spaces, her city blocks ending abruptly like a coloring book waiting to be filled in. Her projections don’t venture through those empty city blocks, just come to a halt where her city ends and those blank spaces begin, and then they turn around, walk determinedly in the other direction. Build with me, Mal thinks, and glances down at Dom, who is sitting up now, interested.

Eames closes his eyes.

And – _oh_ , Mal thinks, because Eames’ New York – his New York is filled with cathedrals, stained glass and the harsh lines of baroque. His New York is a bit of Beijing’s curving roofs, is a bit of Agra’s rounded domes and stylized pop art and arabesque relief panels set against perfectly Corinthian columns, acanthus leaves and all. Eames’ New York is pieces of the whole world at once, snatches of Europe and prehistory, myth and reality. Mal thinks, you’re not as tough as you think you are, imagines Eames ducking into a library, furtive, maybe, telling his mates he’s off drinking or something, thinks of how embarrassed he would have been if one of his friends caught him with a book on Islamic architecture, on ancient Greek reliefs, thinks, who are you, really.

“Beautiful,” she says, and it’s not enough, _beautiful_ doesn’t even begin to cover it, the way the sun glints off the marbled temples, pours stained light into the churches, or really, she thinks, the way Eames looks right now, the sun haloing him in gold, his chest trembling with the effort. He’s like an impressionistic painting, she thinks, a gleam of dark lashes and the red of his open mouth, and when she says again, softer, “beautiful,” he turns to look at her, looks dazed and high on it, looks young and vulnerable, his face cracked wide open.

Dom reaches up, takes her hand, and says, smug, “Didn’t I tell you?”

She laughs, feels as dizzy as Eames looks, and lets Dom tug her down, hooks her arms around her knees. “You did,” she says, and looks out at the New York skyline now, feels like she’s looking across the top of the world, can see all of it at once, time unwinding itself, messy-beautiful, like stray kisses.

“I can forge, too,” Eames says, challenging, and Mal grins at him.

“Show me,” she says, and leans back into Dom, closes her eyes.

 

+

 

“He can do it,” Dom says later that night. “I don’t know what happened today.”

Mal hooks a finger into the neck of his tee shirt, the cotton well-loved, thin as silk. “I know,” she says, soft, and sighs a kiss into the corner of his eye, her breath ruffling his lashes. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Probably I just pushed him too hard,” Dom continues, turning his face towards her. She rests her palm against his cheek, presses a kiss to the frowning corner of his mouth. “He’s just – he’s _good_ , isn’t he? It took me weeks to learn how to build, and then another month after that to build in a controlled fashion and this kid – this kid just walks in and does it, no practice at all.”

Mal shrugs a shoulder, feels warm and heavy, weighed down by the promise of sleep. “I think,” she says carefully, hushed, because she feels almost embarrassed, feels like she’s at confession: “I think it’s because he has a reason to dream. It’s different for us: look at our dreams, Paris or New York or Tokyo. We can _go_ there, we can be those people. But Eames – before he met you, all those places were _just_ dreams, were only ever going to be dreams. You and I dream because we can; Eames dreams because that’s all he knows, because he _has_ to, because he doesn’t have anything else.”

Dom doesn’t say anything for a beat and then says, utterly serious, “That was very profound, Mal.”

“Oh, shut up,” says Mal, and covers her face with her hands, feels her skin going pink with an all-over blush, but Dom is laughing and is half on top of her, peeling her fingers away, kissing her breathless.

“Shh,” she says, trying for admonishing and not quite making it. She’s got her hands knotted in his shirt and she’s catching slow, lazy kisses, likes the heavy weight of him, like he’s going to sink into her, any moment now. “You’ll wake Eames.”

Dom tips his forehead against hers, shares a breath with her. “He was pretty upset today.”

“Yeah,” she says, soft. They’d let the dream run out, the minutes lengthening out into hours, New York fading into Tokyo, where Mal spent a semester studying abroad, and then slipping into Dom’s San Francisco. They’d done Athens, where Mal had counted the fishing boats, colorful dots on the Aegean, and then Moscow, even though none of them had ever been to Moscow, although, Mal had pointed out dryly, Dom’s Moscow looked a lot like his Athens.

“You were very good with him, though,” Mal says, remembering the way Dom had touched him, light between the shoulder blades, leaning close and saying, hey, hey, it’s all right, it’s no big deal, we’ll try again tomorrow, and the way Eames had relaxed into the touch, looking disappointed. And Mal had thought, well, it could have been worse, because she remembers being sixteen, everything so necessary, like the world was always playing at _fortissimo._

Eames had been quiet through lunch and then he’d disappeared until dinner. She’d worried a bit, because it had been getting dark and Eames didn’t know these streets, and more than that, she remembered the first time she’d woken up from a dream, the way the world had seemed muted, less real, the way she’d lain in bed and dreamed about dreams. But Eames had come in at a quarter to eight, ratty hood pulled over his head, and Mal had reminded herself that the one thing that Eames has always had is his freedom, and anyway, she isn’t his mother, isn’t his anything.

“He reminds me of me,” says Dom, wistful, almost, and Mal smiles, reaches up to smooth his hair back.

“I wish I could have known you then,” she says, and means it. It’s an odd sort of longing, wanting to know who Dom was at sixteen and knowing that that’s impossible, wondering if she would have loved him if she’d known him then, and thinking that she probably would have.

“I always – I always felt like I was on – the verge of greatness, I guess,” says Dom, thoughtful. “I don’t know, I always felt like there was so much more out there, and I was so much more than everyone thought I was and – this sounds stupid, doesn’t it,” he says when Mal tries to hide her smile in her palm.

“No,” Mal says, and carefully laces her fingers with his. “No, not at all.”

 

+

 

They wake up.

“Again,” Eames says, flat, when Dom tries to unhook him from the PASIV device. “I can do it.”

He looks tired, Mal thinks, the tilt of his mouth belligerent, desperate, maybe; he looks all of sixteen right now, the sleeves of his hoodie pushed up around his elbows, the curve of his wrists hollow, delicate-looking. We’re pushing him too hard, she thinks, and remembers the cathedrals he’d built yesterday, remembers the sprawling arches, suspension bridges, remembers temples and mausoleums, and she says,

“We know you can. But I don’t think—”

“All right,” Dom interrupts, and slants a sideways smile at her. “Just half an hour, I promise.”

He reminds me of me, Dom had said – Eames and his beautiful dreams.

“Fine,” says Mal, and lies back down. “Half an hour.”

 

+

 

She knocks on Eames’ door and says, “Hey, it’s Mal.”

“Come in,” says Eames after one beat, two, three, and Mal opens the door to find him sitting on his bed. He’s wearing one of Dom’s old college shirts, and it’s too big on him, the way the neck slides across one shoulder, revealing a London-pale strip of skin, a light scattering of freckles. Mal can’t figure out if Eames is short or tall for his age: sometimes he looks terribly young, the way the first thing he does when he wakes up is to look for Dom, and other times he looks older than he should, like driving back from the lab this afternoon, the failure etched deep into his face, stark as one of his arabesque reliefs.

“I brought you coffee,” she says, and holds the mug out. “Don’t worry, it’s decaf.”

“Oh,” Eames says, and takes it from her. “What’s in it?”

“Cream and sugar,” says Mal, and sits down across from him. “I refuse to believe that you like your coffee black. I’ve seen you dream, remember? Black coffee is for those without imaginations.”

Eames smiles a bit, shy, and she thinks, there we are.

“Go on,” she says, teasing. “I promise I’ll get you some black coffee if you don’t like it.”

Eames takes a drink, careful, and then looks startled. “It’s good,” he admits, and gives her another small smile. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” says Mal, and she thinks she should do something here to punctuate that, should maybe pat his shoulder the way she’d seen Dom do earlier that afternoon. She’s not Dom, though, and Eames doesn’t look at her the way he looks at Dom, and right now, Eames is very deliberately not looking at her at all, so Mal just slides her hand into her jeans pocket. “Well, I—”

“I don’t know why I can’t do it,” Eames says, low.

Mal looks at him, his bowed head, his hair falling across his eyes, and wonders where his mother is, what happened to her, that Eames would have crossed an ocean without looking back. And did he have a father, she wonders, or brothers or sisters, and she thinks of the summers behind her, too-sweet tarts and barely-there swimsuits, thinks of bedtime stories and strawberry kisses, and years later, Dom, on her birthday, murmuring, I want this birthday, and all the ones after.

Everyone should have that, she thinks, and feels suddenly and incredibly sad.

“It took me two years to learn how to dream,” Mal says. Eames looks up, sharp-eyed, and Mal continues, “Dom was the one who introduced me to it. I was in my last year of college, ready to get a real job, or maybe go to grad school, and then I met Dom.” Dom, she thinks, fond: Dom had been in his first year of grad school, and she hadn’t thought much of him at first, had only seen the terrible elbow patches and ill-fitting jeans. He’d asked her out three times and she’d said no twice, had been about to say no the third time as well, but before she could, Dom had asked, curious, why not, and she’d stared at him, not sure how to say, well, the elbow patches and the ugly jeans, and so she’d said yes instead.

“He took me to Istanbul,” she remembers, “and New York and San Francisco, and it all felt so _real_. We’d be in the lab in Chicago one moment, and then suddenly we’d be in Buenos Aires, and it didn’t matter that it was raining in Chicago, because Dom’s Buenos Aires was always sunny.” And she’d fallen in love with it, with dreaming, with Dom. Dom would show her the math behind it, all funny symbols and derivatives of derivatives, and she’d curve an arm around his neck, kiss him to shut him up, because dreams, she’d tell him solemnly, weren’t integrals and vectors, they were art, taste and touch and sound.

“If you think everything seems experimental now,” Mal says, “you should’ve seen it _then_. It took me five months to convince Dom to let me be the dreamer, and one month of him checking and double-checking everything.” Once, she remembers, she’d found him standing in front of the mirror, muttering physics equations to himself, and she’d kissed his jaw, right where he hadn’t quite shaven, had said, amused, I’ll be _fine_ , Dom, it’s just a dream, because she’d been dreaming for as long as she remembered, at night and in grade school, about boys and being someone who mattered, and how was this any different?

“I was going to dream Paris,” she says, and looks at Eames, promises, “I’ll take you to Paris, one day: I think you’d like it. Not the outsider’s view of Paris – the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower – but _real_ Paris, the little shops and cafes. We’ll go,” she says, and reaches out, brushes his hair out of his eyes. It’s soft, she thinks, the color of floss laid out in the sun. “Dom figured I should start out with a place I knew, and I kept thinking, maybe I’ll even see my parents, except of course, two seconds after we entered the dream, it collapsed around us.”

“What do you mean?” Eames says, and Mal smiles, leans over, taps at his knuckles.

“Drink your coffee,” she says. “It’ll go cold. I mean exactly that – I got kicked out of my own dream. And it didn’t just happen once – it _kept_ happening. Everywhere we went, Los Angeles or New York or even Chicago, even if I dreamed up my apartment or Dom’s house – the dream would collapse. Neither of us could explain it: just, two seconds into it, it would come crashing down.” She’d been devastated, had been upset whenever Dom tried to talk about it, prickly whenever Dom asked if she wanted to go dreaming with him, because of _course_ the answer was yes, but she wanted to go dreaming in one of her dreams, just once.

“I was so disappointed,” says Mal, “or, no, that’s not the right word – I was devastated. It was lovely, going along with Dom, but _I_ wanted to dream and build. I would’ve given anything for your cathedrals,” she says, and Eames ducks his head a bit, hides a secret curve of a smile, and Mal thinks, hasn’t anyone been kind to you before? “And then, two years later, we’d moved to Maryland and we were both missing Chicago, so Dom dreamed Chicago for us, and I told him, your Chicago looks and feels so real, and Dom said that even when he sleeps, his dreams always feel this real.

“And then I started thinking about my dreams,” says Mal. “My _real_ dreams, the way I’d wake up and never remember them, or even when I was in them, they seemed so fantastical, and I always _knew_ they were dreams, sometimes I’d tell myself, this is a dream, and I’d wake up. I could always tell and I started to wonder if maybe I’m going about this all wrong, because dreams are so intensely personal, aren’t they? Maybe what works for Dom isn’t going to work for me, maybe for my dreams to be stable, they need to be as unrealistic as possible.” She tilts her head back, stares up at the ceiling. “And that was it. It was so – illogical, there was no math behind it, and yet, somehow – it worked. I dreamt Paris as I wanted it, all those details that Dom worked so hard on, blurred over. My dreams will never feel like reality; I concentrate on a few details and leave the rest up to chance. When I take you to my Paris, it won’t feel like real Paris, it’ll feel like – an impression of it.”

She looks back at Eames and doesn’t look away. “What I’m trying to say – the moral of the story – is that sometimes, practice _doesn’t_ make perfect. Maybe the best thing is to back off for now. Dom and I know that you can forge, but maybe it’s like a puzzle: it’ll take some time for all the pieces to come together. You’ll find what works, and more importantly, you’ll find what works for _you._ But you can’t rush that, Eames, you can’t – maybe it’ll take another month, maybe you’ll be like me and it’ll take you another _year_ , but one day, you’ll be able to do it, and I promise that I’ll help you get there.”

Eames looks utterly frozen and she remembers thinking that he looked like an impressionist painting, but now, right now, she thinks how silly that was, because now she can see all the details, like a camera finding its focus: the delicate sweep of lashes and the way his lips are a little chapped; the soft shadow of not yet having to shave every day and the way his hair seems to catch strands of sunlight and keep them.

“Thank you,” Eames says, and it sounds rare off his tongue, a little bit rough, like he hasn’t had a chance to say it all that often, and Mal wants to say, for what, you have every right to be angry with the world, _thank you_ , what is that, but she doesn’t, because she can see the trembling shift of Eames’ throat, the dent in his bottom lip, like he’s been biting at it too hard.

She does it on a whim, does it before she can think better of it, just leans forward and curves her palm around his cheek, kisses his temple, soft strands of his hair catching at her chapstick.

“You’re welcome,” she says, soft, and smiles when Eames smiles at her.

 

+

 

They spend most of May dreamy-eyed, and by June they’ve found their rhythm. They go dreaming in the mornings, Paris’ charming little restaurants fading into the lush green of the Amazon, and in the afternoons, Dom shuts himself up in the lab, grant applications and notebooks and three laptops spread out around him. Mal spends half her afternoons in there with him and the other half showing Eames around the city. She shows him the high school he’ll start at in August, takes him to the dollar theater around the corner that plays films that no one has ever heard of, buys him tarts from the bakery that reminds her of home. She takes him shopping because all of Dom’s clothes are too big on him and buys him too many clothes: she gets the bill in the mail two weeks later and thinks, shit, and has to dip into her savings account, but when Eames comes downstairs, his blue shirt bright against summer-warmed skin, she can’t help but think that it’s worth it when he grins at her before stealing a slice of tomato out of the pan.

Eames turns seventeen at the end of June, admits it the morning of his birthday, but when Dom asks, what do you want to do today, Eames just looks surprised and says, I want to go dreaming, and so they do. Eames builds the dream, the skies blotted out by the stars. He doesn’t try to forge, hasn’t, since Mal had kissed him, that day, and that’s how she thinks of it – that first step, one step back and two forward. Eames builds the English countryside, the mist hanging heavy in the air, and it feels so real that Mal thinks he must’ve spent some time at that countryside, but when she opens her mouth to ask, Dom shakes his head at her, says instead, okay, how about something a little harder, and shows Eames how to build impossible, infinite staircases, labyrinths with multiple solutions and somehow no way out. Eames just looks delighted through all of it, by the way Dom punches his shoulder when he makes an Escher painting come to life. When they wake up, Mal goes out and buys a cake; the girl behind the counter asks what she wants written on it, and it takes Mal twenty minutes to settle on _Happy Birthday_ , and she second-guesses the decision on the drive back. They light seventeen candles and sing to him, Mal’s smoky alto as off-key as Dom’s light tenor, just in the other direction, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because in the soft glow of the candlelight, Eames looks happy, looks seventeen and loved.

Mal goes to the baby shower of the woman who runs the lab across the hall from theirs, and stays long enough to hand over her present. It’s nice, the husband says, looking enormously uncertain about the mountain of presents sitting in the living room and the tittering group of women – I’ve always wanted to have a family, he says to Mal, and Mal thinks about that all the way home, and thinks, we’re a family, aren’t we. They’ve talked about it, her and Dom: they want three, because Dom’s an only child, and Mal’s sister is six years older, six years that might as well be sixty. Dom wants three boys and Mal secretly wants three girls, but not now, she thinks as she parks the car in the garage. Someday, sure, but not yet, because she’s happy, just the way everything is right now.

They discover pieces of each other: Eames starts to draw, on the backs of napkins, on stray scraps of paper, on his hands, the India ink curving in tendrils around his wrist. He draws almost as well as he dreams, Mal thinks, standing at Eames’ desk and looking through the notebooks: there’s Mal’s Paris with its winding roads, and there’s Dom’s Athens, a line of colorful laundry, the delicate prints of the West against Eastern Europe’s strong oranges and deep purples. The dreams give way to drawings of Dom, Dom hunched over the lab bench, or at the computer, and then of people Mal has never seen, people from Eames’ past life, maybe, or people who were never real. She looks for anyone who could be his mother or his father, stares at the black and white sketches, wonders, would that woman have Eames’ green eyes, would that man have Eames’ coloring, lashes stained gold by the sun? She flips to the back and finds a folded-up piece of paper, and thinks, this is not for my eyes, but Eames is out with Dom for the day at a soccer game, and anyway, Mal wants to open it, so she does.

It’s a drawing of her, she realizes after a moment. She’s surprised and doesn’t know why she is, because there are pictures of Dom, rough sketches drawn over with finer lines, and she lives here too, and it’s not at all different from any of the other pictures, save for the fact that it’s folded up, slotted away like a secret. She carefully folds it back up and goes for a walk, thinking about nothing and watching the sunset.

August, though, August is a bit of a mess, because Dom takes Eames out for school supplies; in retrospect, Mal thinks that that was probably a stupid idea, because they come back with a haul of things that Eames mostly doesn’t need: an entire pack of highlighters that contains more colors than three rainbows; drawing pads and slim Sharpies in rare metallics; calligraphy pens and a graphing calculator that should be able to do Eames’ homework, wash the laundry, and hang it up to dry, for the amount it costs. Mal doesn’t say anything though, because Eames already looks uncomfortable, is eyeing the calculator with the wary look of one who knows how much things cost, whose dinner ritual probably consisted of three steps: steal, run, and finally – maybe, if you’re lucky – eat.

But Dom comes into the kitchen before dinner, just as Mal is burning the fish, and confesses, “They rejected my credit card.” He looks a little embarrassed, and Mal thinks she should be annoyed, because Dom has never been very good with money, looks at bills helplessly and lets them pile up on the coffee table because he’s under the delusion that he can dream them away. But she has always known that, has loved that about him, even, the way he’s so ridiculously impractical, the way that he hadn’t let her plan their honeymoon, had just taken her to the airport, told her to close her eyes and pick a flight, any flight.

“We’ll be fine,” she says lightly, and she spends the night looking over credit card statements and old bills, looking for ways to cut back. The problem is that they’re funding a lot of their research themselves: the government doesn’t have all that much money for research these days and even less for research about something as useless as _dreams_ , is what each rejection letter says in elaborate, roundabout language even as they pile up on Mal’s desk, heavy as a doorstop. But it’s fine, she thinks, it has to be fine, and she tries not to think about it, turns off the light and goes to sleep.

She thinks that’s the end of it, but in the morning she’s pouring Eames his coffee, half-asleep, and she’s startled when he curves his hand around her wrist and says, determined, “I can get a job.”

“What?” she says, and over-pours, the coffee leaving a dark ring on the table.

“I heard you last night,” Eames says, the set of his mouth mulish. “If you need money—”

“No,” says Mal, easy.

“Look, if it’s because of me—”

“It’s not,” Dom says, and when Eames casts a dubious look sidelong at him, he admits, “It’s not _just_ because of you, all right? Some months are harder than others and our jobs don’t pay all that well, but it’s not your fault. Mal and I lived on less than half of what we do now in Chicago, and we were fine.”

Eames still looks unconvinced, so Mal says, “Children shouldn’t work anyway.” It comes out wrong, but the sentiment is still there: childhood is about being outside, about getting into trouble and wearing tiny little cutoff shorts; it’s about your bare toes curling in the fresh morning dew, and staying up too late and sleeping in even later in the morning. Her parents had never let her work, had taught her how precious her summers were, had made sure that there were croissants for breakfast and sweets for dessert, and that’s how it should be, Mal thinks, especially for someone like Eames, who’s never had that before.

But Eames just looks angry, the planes of his face drawn up tight as origami. “I’m not a _child_ ,” he says, and she thinks, here we go, because that’s what seventeen is: hot-headed, easy to a temper, and hard to coax back down -- it’s sixteen made worse by how close you are to eighteen. But you _are_ a child, she thinks, thinks of the uncomplicated way Eames smiles now, how in two months he’s unraveled for them, like a flower blooming in the spring. She thinks of the way he always positions himself so that he’s close to Dom, dragging his chair around the table or sitting at his feet when they’re watching those shitty late night talk shows, when half the channels are playing terrible soft porn and the other half those equally terrible infomercials. She thinks of the way Eames lights up when Dom asks him to throw the football around with him, and the way he helps her fold the laundry and doesn’t complain about the way she puts on old jazz records, hums along to the blue notes, the soft trills.

“You are, actually,” she says mildly.

Eames doesn’t say anything, but his face shutters closed and when Dom says that he’ll probably be in the lab all afternoon, Eames immediately volunteers to go with him. It’ll be boring, Dom says, placating, but Eames says, don’t worry about me, the edges of his voice rough, like they’ve been filed raw. He finishes his breakfast quietly and doesn’t say goodbye to Mal, just shoves past her to go and wait in the car.

“He’ll be fine in an hour,” Dom says, sounding unbothered; Mal tells herself she’s not bothered either.

Dom turns out to be half-right: Eames is fine the next day and it should feel like everything’s gone back to normal. She pours his coffee for him and he spends the afternoon on the couch, flipping through an architecture magazine – a subscription they really can’t afford but get anyway – while Mal pretends to watch a crappy Lifetime movie. She can’t help but look at Eames, though, the languid curve to his shoulders, which have filled out a bit, the still-stark press of his shoulder blades. He _is_ a child, she tells herself, except there’s a gleam of recently healed skin where his sleeve ends, the sliver of a scar at his hairline. It makes her so – so _something_ , when she sees these things, how life has left its rough imprints on Eames, and she reaches over to smooth his hair back, a little frantic, but Eames – who would normally lean into the touch, would tilt his head and give her a lazy smile – leans away.

Mal snatches her hand back, pretends that her face isn’t burning.

So, it’s not over, exactly: the peace between them feels a little broken, fragile. Eames is more cautious with his smiles, and Mal notices other things now, things that used to make her smile that suddenly feel like blades right under her skin, sharp and mocking: the way Eames stops dreaming up cathedrals and starts building the mazes that Dom loves so dearly; the way he starts to drink his coffee black if she’s running late that morning and isn’t there to add the milk and sugar; the reverent way he touches Dom, just light to the shoulder, an overly gentle elbow to the ribs, looking startled each time when he realizes he’s allowed; and the terribly reverent way that he _doesn’t_ touch Mal, the way they reach for the potatoes at the same time and Eames flinches when Mal’s bracelet skitters across his wrist.

It feels uncomfortably like jealousy, but jealousy, Mal asks herself in the mirror, what is that. It’s not a _competition_ , it’s not Dom against her, but it feels like one, feels like she’s been left behind, like there’s a foreign language in the way Eames leans over in the middle of a movie, whispers something into Dom’s ear, in the way Dom throws his head back and laughs, the way they share elbow space on the armrest, and it’s stupid, she thinks viciously: it’s absolutely insane to be jealous, it _is_.

She doesn’t say anything about it for a few days, just lets the burn of it sicken low in her stomach. It’s Dom who finally asks her what’s wrong, in the morning when she’s brushing her hair.

“I just,” she says, and feels helpless. “I want him to like me.”

Dom looks surprised, reaches over to tuck a curl behind her ear, kisses her shoulder. “He does.”

“I—” but Mal doesn’t know how to say, the way he touches you and the way he _looks_ at you, because Dom won’t understand, can’t understand how desperately Mal has started to want that, being the one who Eames shows all his drawings to, being the one who Eames angles his body towards when they’re at dinner or at the theater, being chosen. It’s _ridiculous_ , she tells herself, again and again, the litany of it carrying on and on, but the thing is, she can’t stop thinking about it, later in their dream when Eames tugs at Dom’s sleeve to show him a paradox-room – and Mal can’t help but want it, all of it: Eames’ head in her lap, the careless slide of consonants into vowels, the easy certainty of it – of being wanted.

Three days before the first day of school, Eames comes to her, kitchen shears in hand, and asks her to cut his hair. It’s too long, he explains, and shows her the way it gets in his eyes. All right, says Mal, and doesn’t say that she can take him to a barber, because she thinks that maybe this is what they need, a few moments here and there, and maybe they can patch up what Mal broke.

She trades the kitchen shears for a sharper, slimmer pair of scissors, and they stand in the master bath with all the lights turned up as bright as they’ll go. Eames’ eyes are shut, and Dom would tease him about that, Mal thinks, but Mal isn’t Dom, and Eames had come to Mal for a reason. She works slowly and quietly, her fingers careful in Eames’ hair, tilting Eames’ head this way and that. Here is a moment that matters, she thinks: Eames is silent and obedient, and when she’s done, it looks a little like Dom’s hair, conscientious and neat and perfect for millions of boys who aren’t Eames, with his sweet smile and the latticework of scars on his left knee, Eames, who laughs like he’s never been allowed to until now.

“Oh,” says Eames, soft, and she can’t read anything in that, so she says,

“Wait,” and tilts his head down, cuts close along the shape of his head, the seconds stretching thin into minutes, Mal’s soft snips running along the uneven lilts of Eames’ breaths. “There,” she says when she’s done, and thinks, perfect, because he doesn’t look like Dom anymore, doesn’t look like he could be anyone else. He looks older, looks like the thirteen-year-old kid who walked into a knife fight and came out with just a snaky line of blood through his eyebrow. He looks, Mal thinks, like the thirty-year-old dreamer he’ll become, better than all of them, building cathedrals and slipping into different skins.

“What do you think?” Mal says, and brushes away some stray hairs caught on the back of his shirt.

“I like it,” says Eames, and gives her a rueful grin. “It makes me look older, doesn’t it?”

Mal kisses Eames’ shoulder through the thin cotton of his shirt, catches the silhouette of his lashes against the curve of his cheek, and she doesn’t say: I like you like this, just the way you are.

 

+

 

The first day of school, Mal takes a ridiculous number of pictures: Eames when he’s just woken up, hair rumpled and soft lines on his cheek from where he’d slept on his hand; Eames shaving and trying to elbow her out of the bathroom at the same time because, Mal, I need to use the toilet; at breakfast, Dom reaching over to mess up Eames’ hair and Eames grinning up at him, making no effort to stop him; and against the wall near the front door so that she can get the way he smiles – that smile, the one _right there_ – a little shy, a little anxious, a little pleased.

“You must’ve gone to school in London,” Mal says, trying to make the question casual, because as a rule, Eames doesn’t talk about London. She’s asked, a couple times, because she can see sixteen years written across Eames’ skin: a shiny pink burn just below his left clavicle, the tiny scrawl of a tattoo on his right hip – a letter, maybe, the slope of an R, a crude little symbol with an odd delicacy to it. There must have been school, somewhere in between those roach-infested flats and the grimy water coming out of the tap, because Eames can read well, if a bit slowly, silently shaping the words before he says them, like he wants to get them exactly right. His accent is neat, if utterly nondescript, British and nothing more, and, she knows, an affectation, because of the way Eames swears when he drops a dinner plate, the consonants thinning, flattening out.

“Yes,” says Eames, short, and nothing else.

Dom comes in, takes the camera away from her, and says, “One hundred pictures, Mal, really, Jesus,” and Mal says loftily,

“It was one hundred fifty, actually, before I deleted the ones that had your face in them.”

The drive to the high school takes approximately five minutes, or ten if you’re Dom and you happen to think the speed limits they give you are much too lax. They wait five minutes in the long line of cars and Mal stares out at the kids in their colorful polo shirts and enormous backpacks as Eames and Dom argue about dream levels, if a dream within a dream could ever be stable, if it would be as detailed as the first level; Mal listens to them talk about paradoxes of paradoxes, of three dimensions unraveling into four or five or six, of planes realigning, and she wants to lean over, wants to tell Dom to turn around and drive them home, because Eames doesn’t belong here, with that harassed-looking school aide in ugly phosphorescent orange, _Eames_ , who loves infinity mirrors and impossible staircases.

You’re too good for this, Mal wants to say as a cherry red Honda Civic honks behind him, seventeen years of adolescent rage beaten into the horn. But then Eames is getting out, and Dom is saying, hey, hey, wait up, and Mal is lowering her window, is knotting her hand in Eames’ collar and pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. She almost says, if you hate it, call me, I’ll come pick you up, because she can’t bear to think of Eames stranded here, and, what, he’s seventeen, does he even have to be in school, because what’s the point, she wants to ask Dom, of learning about the Boston tea party or Charles’s Law when Eames can take apart Penrose stairs, can wrap them back around so that a building is five levels and also only one?

But then Eames is going, is disappearing into the mess of high school. Mal says, “Wait,” when Dom pulls away from the curb, because she wants to wait until she loses sight of him. It only takes a few seconds, the clean new white of Eames’ shirt shaded out by a girl in a tiny miniskirt which will probably get her sent home for violating dress code, then Dom is pulling away, and Mal sits back, feeling heavy, like her seatbelt is weighing her down into the seat.

“He’ll be fine,” Dom says, neutral, but she can see the barest shadow of a smile as he takes a left.

“I know,” says Mal, and leans against the window, lets her breath fog the glass opaque.

They go dreaming and it feels strange without Eames, like a stitch come undone. Mal lets Dom build Chicago, the tiny apartment they lived in until Dom finished grad school, the ceilings damp with the first signs of mold. “Was it always this much of a shithole?” Dom wonders, and Mal privately thinks, yes, it was, and it was worse, really, because the walls had been thin enough that every sound was telegraphed through. The hot water tap had been temperamental and half the outlets hadn’t worked, but this is where Dom had asked her to marry him on her birthday; he’d taken the PASIV device out of the lab and they’d gone dreaming here, in this little space they’d optimistically called their living room. She’d dreamed up Paris in the first blush of autumn and they’d gone to her favorite _pâtisserie_ and he’d asked her, what would you do – if I asked, and she’d said, yes, yes, had said it again and again, hadn’t been able to stop.

“What do you think?” Dom says, and when she looks at him, askance, he clarifies, “A dream within a dream: two levels. I was reading Sanford’s abstract this morning; he doesn’t think it’s doable.” Dom looks a little starry, and Mal smiles fondly at him, kisses the ink stains on his fingers.

“I think you can do anything,” she says, helplessly honest, because she’s always believed that.

When they wake up, Mal forgets and looks for Eames, feels a sharp ache at the empty space where he isn’t. It’s odd, she thinks, because Eames has only been with them for three months, but she already misses the way he builds, with sheets of metal that are thin as glass and sheets of glass that are thin as air. She misses the way he’d lean against her, beg her to make Dom stop when he’d start talking about dream theory, this behemoth of a science that sprawls into psychology and physics and philosophy, because all Eames and Mal want to do is build cathedrals.

She takes a taxi back to the house at one-thirty and is making sandwiches in the kitchen when the front door opens. “Hey,” she calls, spreading mayonnaise on a slice of bread. “I’m in the kitchen. How was—” and then stops, because Eames is standing in the doorway, an absolute mess: his shirt is streaked brown, like he’s been rolling in dirt, and he’s lost the top three buttons, enough that she can see the silver lace of carelessly healed skin at the base of his sternum. An ugly black is shadowing his right eye and his nose looks swollen, like it was bleeding not too long ago.

“Oh my God,” she says, and drops the knife.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Eames says, a little embarrassed.

“What _happened?_ ” Mal says, and goes to him, carefully touches his eyebrow, traces the swelling with the pads of her fingers. Eames flinches a bit, the corners of his mouth thinning out, but she doesn’t stop, because, “Did you get in a _fight?_ ”

“…no?” Eames says. “Mal, I’m fine, really.”

“Right,” says Mal, sourly. “Because you _look_ fine.”

Eames grins, rueful, touches the edge of the swelling. His eye will probably swell shut in a couple of hours, Mal thinks a little hysterically, and she doesn’t know what to _do_ , because the one time Dom had gotten into a fight, it had involved flurries of strongly worded letters of complaint and a lot of pretending not to glare. She goes to the refrigerator, finds a frozen bag of peas, and bats Eames’ hand away when he tries to take it from her.

“Tell me what happened,” Mal says, and sets the bag against the swelling.

“It was a fight,” Eames says dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, it happens.”

“Was it your fault?” Mal asks.

Eames tilts his head a bit, shrugs. “I started it, yeah,” he says, and now he sounds a little annoyed, and that’s really rich, Mal thinks, sorry, am I annoying you? “Seriously, Mal, it’s nothing; it’s between me and a couple of other guys, but it’s taken care of, okay? I won’t get kicked out of school, it’s fine.”

“How,” Mal says, “how is this _fine?_ Eames, you can’t just go around _punching people_.”

“Apparently I can,” Eames says, bright with malice, and Mal just stares at him, thinks, who are you.

“Go to your room,” she says sharply. “Just – Dom and I will come talk to you in a few hours.”

Eames lifts the bag of peas off his eye, disbelieving. “Come on, Mal, you can’t send me to my room. Dom said we could go under when I came back from school.”

“Yes, well,” Mal says, and feels suddenly angry, can’t remember the last time she felt anger like this, the slivers of it cold, right under her skin. “Dom probably didn’t think you’d suddenly turn into a hoodlum.” She doesn’t mean it to hurt, exactly, but it comes out acidic instead of just teasing, and Eames’ face goes hard and ugly. It’s like being in one of those hall of mirrors at a circus, thinking you know what the world looks like, only to find everything distorted. It’s like, Mal thinks, touching a friend and finding a stranger.

“You can’t ground me,” Eames says, flat. “You’re not my mother, Mal.”

“No,” says Mal, and feels terribly, horribly calm. “But I can still be disappointed in you.” She hands him the bag of peas and he takes it from her, their fingers never brushing. “Go to your room. Please.”

He goes.

 

+

 

Dom comes back at four and Mal immediately dispatches him to Eames’ room. Talk to him, she says, and Dom says, all right, all right, and Mal thinks she probably shouldn’t listen through the door, but then again, she reasons, Eames probably shouldn’t have punched anyone, either. Dom is predictably useless, saying things like, well, just try to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and Eames is somehow apologizing without sounding at all apologetic; Mal thinks about going in, maybe yelling at both of them, but then Dom is saying, hey, I think I have an idea about the second level, and apparently that’s the end of it, because Dom is talking about the chemistry of a dream and Eames is cutting in with a question every now and then, like a minor chord overlaying the melody.

“You,” she accuses when Dom and Eames come down for dinner.

They look at each other warily, not sure who she means.

“You’re both idiots,” she informs them and means it, can’t quite rid herself of the anger, like a thread snagged on a nail. Eames follows her into the kitchen, and she thinks about telling him to get out but doesn’t, doesn’t say anything at all as he leans against the counter, doesn’t look at the way the kitchen lights pick up the ugly yellowed-out edges of the bruise around his eye or the soft flare of red across his jaw. He’s just a kid, she reminds herself, seventeen and a little hot-headed and a little bit of a jerk, and she knows that, because that’s what seventeen is: feeling trapped in your own skin.

“I don’t want you to be angry,” Eames says finally, and for some reason, Mal finds that hilarious.

“I would really like to not be angry,” she says. “Except you’re not making it very easy.”

“What do you want from me?” Eames says, petulant, and _seventeen_ , she thinks, feeling helpless.

I want to know you, she thinks; I want to know how you can build pyramids and pleasure domes and then get into stupid fights like you’re just another kid. I want to know where you learned to build minarets and arabesques, and I want to know how that reconciles with where you learned to punch someone in the face. I want, she thinks, and that’s the problem with wanting, because it’s limitless as a dream.

“Everything,” Mal admits and thinks, how do you not know this already: “Eames, what you can do – the way you dream – it’s beautiful and fantastic and it’s something that very few people can do. You made an entire city out of glass two days ago; you took the impossible staircase and you _made_ it possible.”

“Mal,” Eames says, utterly and weirdly blank. He sounds a little desperate, but that doesn’t make sense.

“And then,” Mal says, “you come home from school with your face all messed up, and you act like that’s who you are: just another kid who starts fights and smokes pot behind the dumpster and barely passes his classes. But, God, Eames, you’re so much more than that. You’re _so_ much more than that.”

Eames is silent for ten heartbeats; she counts them and thinks, here is another moment.

“Who I am in the dreams – that’s not me, Mal,” Eames says, quiet as a confession, and Mal wants to say, I know that, because of course she does. They’re all a little different in dreams; they’re all pretending to be someone else. And _Eames_ , she thinks, Eames must be pretending harder than any of them, because in dreams Eames doesn’t keep his scars the way Dom keeps the ink stains on his fingers.

Mal reaches for Eames’ hand, presses a kiss to the secret-soft inside of his wrist.

“No,” she says. “I like you real.”

 

+


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to dialectical for the beta

September is slow as a dream and when they wake in October, it’s to find everything gilded with autumn. It’s always like this, the way summer creeps into the fall: the days seem somehow both long and short, and sometimes Mal can’t figure out where the dreams end and where reality begins. It’s something about the shuffle of October into November, the holidays all clustered together at the end of the year. It’s something, Mal thinks, winding a scarf around Dom’s neck, about the chilled skin and the slow mornings, something about the twinkling little lights that go up around campus, the hush of fog at dawn.

Dom starts to spend more time in the lab, a little frantic, like he’s worried the year will end too soon. “I’m so close, Mal,” his voice filters, tinny, through the speakerphone. “I think I can get the second level to be stable for one minute, and that’s—”

“Two hours,” says Eames from where he’s playing solitaire on the floor. The cards are new, casino-crisp, neat geometries on the carpet. “One minute in the real world gives five minutes in the first level, which is two hours in the second.” He doesn’t look up and Mal thinks, no, this year isn’t the same, because somehow – somehow, Eames has slid himself into their lives as neatly as he’s sliding the four of spades back into the deck. She thinks there must have been a time when five o’clock in the afternoon didn’t mean French homework and pre-calculus, didn’t mean Lewis structures and graphing calculators, but she can’t remember it, thinks of five o’clocks behind her, making dinner and waiting for Dom to come home, thinks how lonely she must have been.

“Just make sure you’re home for dinner,” Mal instructs, and hangs up.

Five o’clock goes a bit like this, with Mal feeling blurry-sleepy, curled up on the couch with a quilt tucked loosely around her shoulders, and Eames cheating at solitaire. “I saw that,” she says comfortably, feeling loose-limbed, winding down like a top spinning in drowsy and then drowsier circles.

“No, you didn’t,” Eames says, automatic, and she smiles, reaches out to drag a hand through his hair. It grows so fast, she marvels; it’s somehow sticking up and falling across Eames’ forehead at the same time, and it’s grown out of its military-like severity, soft even as it catches under her fingernails.

“How was school?” she asks.

“Fine,” he says, and tilts his head back into her hand.

“Oh, _really_ ,” says Mal. “How was your English exam?”

“Fine,” Eames says, and makes a soft, discontented noise when she lets her hand drop.

“Spoiled,” she murmurs, but obediently threads her fingers back into his hair. “And how about—”

“Also fine,” Eames says, sarcastic-bright, and Mal retaliates by flicking at his ear.

“ _Fine_ ,” she says, and climbs off the couch, sits next to Eames, elbows him. “What’s up?”

Eames slants a sideways look at her, enough so that Mal has a brief, weird moment of seeing someone new: there’s something foreign about the set of his mouth, the way his lashes sweep across his cheek. It’s strange and somehow utterly familiar all at once and then it’s gone, because Eames is leaning against her, warm and easy, smelling like Costco soap and clean sweat.

“I have a French quiz tomorrow,” he admits.

“You’re good at French,” she says, because it’s true. Eames is picking up French like he’s picking up the cards now, the knave of hearts glaring, cross-eyed, up at him. She watches him shrug a shoulder, still a little embarrassed each time, like he’s not sure what to do with these offhanded compliments. “You’re ridiculous,” she informs him, and that earns her a grin.

“Want to play a game?” Eames says, and holds up the deck.

Mal does.

 

+

 

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, they lose a grant and the university moves them to a smaller lab. We’re just trying to maximize our use of space, the harassed-looking woman who delivers the news to them says, clutching at her clipboard like she’s afraid Dom might yank it away and beat her with it. You don’t really – produce any results, she says haltingly, and then Mal almost does yank the clipboard away and beat her with it. And anyway, she adds, beaming and drifting unerringly back to the door, it’s not like you _need_ the space the way Dr. Jones does – he’s trying to teach monkeys how to speak English.

“I think I should get a second job,” Mal says later, when they’re shown to their new lab. It’s tinier than she expected, and looks like it’s been half-heartedly cleaned out, looks like it was constructed with the rest of the building and then someone wasn’t sure whether it should be a lab or a broom closet, and so it became both. There’s one sad-looking window that opens up to a sadder-looking grey brick wall, and how, Mal wonders, how is it that Dom can build New York City stretching out to the sea and mazes that take one minute to build and three days to solve, but he gets _this_ in return?

“We’re fine,” Dom says distractedly, bent over his laptop.

We’re not, is what Mal doesn’t say, and she thinks of the bills that have collected on the coffee table, the bright red font that says they’ve missed two payments on their electricity bill or the horribly calm voice on the answering machine informing them that their Internet connection has been suspended until further notice. And that’s fine, they’ve always lived like that, paying off one late electricity bill only to find that they’re later on the gas bill, but now they’ve lost more grant money and there’s Eames to think about, Eames who should have a cell phone like every other kid his age, should have more than two pairs of jeans and shirts from Walmart.

I’m going to get a coffee, Mal says, and then walks over to the art museum, fills out an application for a job. It’s part-time and it doesn’t pay much, won’t get Eames an iPod or Dom the new laptop the university refuses to pay for, but it’s something, at least. She gets the job a week later and tells Dom and Eames about it over dinner that night. They look warily at each other and then Dom says, maybe I can—

“No,” says Mal, and when Eames looks like he’s going to say something, she says flatly, “Don’t.”

“I’m _seventeen_ ,” Eames says, like Mal hadn’t been there for his birthday, like she hadn’t stood at the bakery counter and spelled out E-A-M-E-S for the cake box. “I can work, I don’t understand—”

“You’re seven _teen_ ,” Mal says. “When I was seventeen, I was breaking curfew five times a week and skipping school and wearing ridiculously short skirts and sneaking around with boys. I wasn’t wiping down tables and working for less than minimum wage at some horrible diner.” Eames is staring at her, blank, and she thinks that this is like August all over again and there, _wonderful_ , she’s gone and broken everything again, just when she’d thought that they’d figured each other out.

And Mal doesn’t know how to say, I want to make you happy, and I want you to be happy _forever_ , because none of it sounds exactly right. She doesn’t know how to say, I want to give you everything I can, doesn’t know how to explain the way Eames looks right now, in his navy Henley, the buttons all undone, the way his shoulders have filled out a little or the way he looks when he smiles or when he dreams or when he’s doing his homework, lip caught under his teeth. It’s sort of the way she loves Dom – helpless, like she’s caught in a thunderstorm – and _love_ , how do you even say that, but it _is_ , and that – that’s something new, _love_ , but it’s not at all new, because she’s loved Eames ever since that first dream; build with me, she’d said, and of course it’s love. Of course it is.

“That’s what you think I should be doing,” Eames says, his smile wrong, too sharp.

“Mal,” says Dom, uncomfortably, but Mal says,

“Yes,” because she knows seventeen better than Eames seems to.

Eames is still smiling that wrong smile, his face on the knife-edge of beautiful-ugly, but then he says, “Okay,” and he’s turning towards Dom, saying, can you help me with my maths homework, I can never understand dot product, and one moment passes and then the next, and Mal thinks, okay, it’s okay.

It keeps being okay through the next couple of weeks. Mal spends her mornings in the lab with Dom and her afternoons in the museum. She gets home around six and makes dinner, falls asleep by eight with Dom quoting journal articles at her like they’re lullabies. It’s not hard, exactly, she’s not working any harder than anyone else with a nine-to-five job, and she likes the way the two fit – dreaming in the morning and art in the afternoon – but she feels exhausted all the time, wonders if this means she’s getting old. It’s worth it, though, because she drags Dom over to the Verizon store two weeks before Christmas to pick out a phone for Eames, and smiles a kiss into Dom’s shoulder when he says, it’s going pretty well, isn’t it, and Mal leans into Dom’s hand, says, I think it is.

It’s even more worth it when Eames brings a friend over from school. This is Andrew, he says when Mal gets back from work. Andrew turns out to be a quiet kid, all elbows and wrists – the sort of kid that makes the honor roll every quarter, takes five AP classes, and thinks he probably wants to be an engineer when he grows up. Mal smiles uncertainly at him, says, hi, I’m Mal. Eames says, so, we’re just – going to go upstairs and get our chem homework done, and she thinks, that’s – odd, tells Dom so that night, when Dom is gently kissing her to sleep.

“They’re so different,” she says. “Why are they friends?”

Dom follows the curve of her throat with his knuckles, rests his hand against her chest like he can feel the slow flutter of her heartbeat. “I don’t know,” Dom says, and lays a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “We probably just don’t know Eames as well as we think we do.”

That’s stupid, Mal thinks, watching the way the streetlights slit through the broken window blinds, throwing sheets of jaundice-yellow light onto the ceiling. She knows everything about Eames: the way he doesn’t hold his pencil correctly, the way he refuses to accept that the knife is supposed to go in your dominant hand. She knows that he falls asleep on his back and wakes up on his stomach, that he prefers Islamic architecture to anything else. She knows that he likes dark chocolate and hates white, that he likes Hitchcock’s films and being up in the morning, when dawn is just a long, drawn-out promise. She knows that he cheats shamelessly at cards, even though she can’t figure out how, and she knows the way he relaxes against Mal, turns his face into her shoulder when Dom starts talking about the physics of a dream.

“I know him,” she says, more fiercely than she means to, but Dom isn’t listening, is already asleep.

They spend Christmas at home; Mal buys a miniature fake tree and sets it up in the living room. It’s sort of – ugly, Dom says with what he probably thinks is some form of tact, and Mal says honestly, your shirt is ugly, because it is, is one of those horrible plaid shirts that Dom’s mother sends him for Christmas each year, probably because she knows that Mal hates the color green. You think my shirt is _wonderful_ , Dom says, a little gleeful, and kisses her against the window so that her back goes cold and her face is warm from Dom’s hands.

Mal burns the Sara Lee pie because she forgets about it until Eames goes into the kitchen for a glass of water and says, hey, Mal, I think– and then they watch _It’s a Wonderful Life_ and eat around the burnt parts. Eames’ head ends up in her lap, and she can’t help but steal glances at him, the way the Christmas lights edge him in red and blue and green. It’s good, right, she whispers and means the movie, but Eames grins up at her indulgently, says, yeah, Mal, it’s really good, and then, softer, says, Happy Christmas.

They open presents after, sitting on the floor like Mal and her sister used to do when they were children. Dom opens his present from Mal first, says, wondering, _Mal_ , because it’s the netbook that Mal’s been saving up for since two Christmases ago. I know it’s not the laptop you wanted exactly, Mal says, feeling inexplicably nervous, but the salesperson said – and Dom curves his hand around the back of her neck, kisses her and says, I love you, and Mal tilts her forehead against his, says, I know.

Dom gives her the pair of heels she’s secretly wanted for seven months now, ever since she’d torn out the page from a magazine at the doctor’s office. They’re frivolous and frivolously expensive and she’s already wondering where the money came from, is trying to remember if Dom’s taken that much money out of the savings account recently or what, but Dom just nudges at her, says, for once, Mal, don’t worry about it. Okay, Mal says, and then, quieter, you’re kind of wonderful, and Dom says, smiling, I know.

Eames turns his present over two, three times, before opening it. He picks up the phone like it’s fragile and Mal feels strangely shy when he looks up at her, doesn’t say anything.

“If you don’t like it,” Mal says hurriedly, “we can always go back and pick out something else.”

“No,” says Eames. “No, it’s great. It’s just, I know a kid who has this phone, it’s really—”

“Don’t say _expensive_ ,” Dom warns. “Besides, I’ll have you know that _one_ of Mal’s shoes is twice as expensive as that phone.”

Mal throws a balled-up piece of tissue paper at him and then crawls closer to Eames, reaches up and touches the corner of his frown, pushing insistently until it disappears into a smile. “There we go,” she says, and then puts her mouth to his ear. “It’s Christmas. You’re supposed to blow your budget on Christmas, that’s how it works.” She rests her chin on his shoulder. “Look, it holds music too.”

“That’s awesome,” says Eames, and then turns his face to kiss Mal’s cheek. “Thanks. Thank you.”

Dom grins, all lit up by the wine and the Christmas lights, says, “Go ahead. Open it.”

 

+

 

For New Year’s Eve they go down to the harbor, sneaking in shitty wine and passing the bottle around because Mal forgets to bring glasses. You, Mal tells Eames as he snatches the wine away from her, takes a long drink as the fireworks knife color through the sky, turn it into a kaleidoscope. I’m going to go to jail for providing alcohol to a minor, she says, and Eames laughs, his mouth sticky with red wine.

Mal hooks her arms around Dom and Eames’ elbows and they shout _three, two, one, Happy New Year!_ with everybody else, screaming themselves hoarse. This year, Mal yells into Eames’ year, is going to be even better than last year, and Eames catches her hands in his, yells back that he’s holding her to that promise. They stumble back to the car and spend ten minutes arguing over who’s the least drunk.

“It’s _me_ ,” Eames says, exasperated. “Dom, give me the keys.”

“Okay,” Dom says agreeably, and Mal protests,

“You don’t even have your license.”

“I didn’t have one in England, either,” Eames says, and unlocks the doors. “That didn’t stop me.”

“Good man,” Dom says, and pats Eames on the back. “Just remember: stay on the right side of the road.”

Mal says, “Oh, God,” and wonders who’s going to bail them out when they inevitably end up in jail.

Eames drives fast, which is expected, and well, which isn’t. The drive out of the harbor is a little scary because it’s twelve-thirty and twenty degrees and everyone seems to have realized at the same time that being outside is enormously stupid. Eames has to swerve around a car that drifts into his lane without warning, and Mal hides her face in her hands, says, “I can’t look,” and then proceeds to look anyway.

It’s after one by the time they get home and they should probably get to bed, Mal says uncertainly, but she’s happy right now, with Eames’ arm around her waist – not that I’m going to _fall_ , she tells him, absolutely certain of that, at least – and Dom fumbling with the keys to the front door. The house is still strung with Christmas lights and the tree is still up, and Mal doesn’t want the night to be over, so when Dom finds a bottle of wine in the pantry, Mal lets herself be led over to the couch and drinks one glass, two, and then stops counting, falls asleep to Dom telling Eames the story of their first date, how Mal accidentally elbowed Dom in the face and how it had ended in the hospital parking lot, kissing carefully to avoid Dom’s broken nose.

She wakes up at eleven the next morning, tangled up with Eames on the couch. Her head hurts and she feels unbearably heavy, like her bones have been loaded with weights. “Dom?” she calls, automatic, and finds him on the floor curled around a pillow when she trips over him on the way to the bathroom. “I’m never drinking again,” she informs him and buries her face in his shoulder.

Of course, Mal spends the next fifteen minutes bent over the toilet while Dom and Eames are somehow completely hangover-free. “Why don’t you feel sick?” she says, accusing, rests her forehead against the cool porcelain as Eames runs a solicitous hand down her back.

“I didn’t drink a bottle of wine by myself, for one,” Eames says, not even pretending to hide his smile.

“I’m such a terrible role model, aren’t I,” Mal murmurs, and shifts so that her face is tucked into the curve of Eames’ neck. Eames laughs a little, and she thinks how much she loves that laugh, the way the past seven months have smoothed out its hard edges, made it a little more carefree. I know you, she thinks.

“You really are,” Eames says solemnly and then laughs when Mal tries to pinch him. He grabs her hand before she can, drops a kiss into her palm; it feels a little bit like catching a falling star. “But I like you anyway.”

 

+

 

In January, Dom gets an invitation to present at a conference in Washington. He calls her at the museum to tell her about it, confesses, I’m nervous, and Mal clutches at her phone, feeling a little anxious. You’ll be great, Mal promises, and remembers the first time she’d ever seen Dom give a presentation. She remembers the way she’d picked out his clothes for him the night before, the way he’d practiced speaking in front of the mirror, how wooden and halting it had sounded, and Mal had thought, he’s going to be so terrible.

Except she’d forgotten that this wasn’t just a talk, it was a talk on _dreams_.

So when Dom had started talking about the way dreams and the subconscious intertwine, that thin seam between them where infinity exists – the way dream theory takes the architecture of reality and applies it to what lies right under reality, threatening and terrifying and rich as antimatter – the way people say _anything is possible_ and never mean it – the way that we never seem to realize it’s a dream until we wake up – when Dom had been up there, lit bright by the stage lights, like this was where he belonged, Mal had thought, of course, because the thing is that no one, no one loves dreaming as much as Dom.

The only problem was when someone had asked afterwards: yes, but what’s the _point?_

She gets off work early and calls Dom’s favorite restaurant, an hour north of the city. Reservation for three, she says, and at some point she’ll get used to it, _three_ , the way she’s gotten used to picking Eames’ towel off the bathroom floor. She drives to the high school, thinks, okay, the reservation is for six and she wants to pick out new cuff links for Dom’s grey dress shirt and she still has to go to the grocery store because they’re out of milk. That leaves – not enough time, she thinks, and pulls over to the side of the road, tries to pick out Eames from the rest of the kids.

There are just so _many_ of them, the girls bundled up top in colorful pea coats with their legs inexplicably bare, and boys in terrible, too-big fleece. Mal waits for a minute, looks for Eames’ black hoodie or his dark blue jeans, worn thin already at the knees, but that’s like trying to pluck raindrops out of a cloud. They look so young, she thinks, and wonders how Eames blends in with them, what he talks about with them. She remembers the one time Eames had brought a friend over to the house, remembers the way they’d looked in the living room, the way her eyes had caught on Eames like a knot in a necklace, the way she’d forgotten the other kid’s name five minutes after hearing it because some days, Eames is brighter than the sun.

And then she sees him.

He’s not far, just across the street, standing next to the chain link fence that runs the perimeter of the school, a feeble warning that would spell _authority_ more clearly if it wasn’t broken in a twenty-foot section where the high school drifts into a city park. He looks familiar-strange; it’s _Eames_ , of course, with his rumpled hoodie and battered sneakers, but isn’t at the same time, because he has one hand tangled in the chain links and is crowding a girl back against the fence, kissing her a little messy. His other hand is curled in the collar of her coat, and the girl has her hands knotted in Eames’ hoodie, is tilting her face up for kisses.

It’s – _oh_ , Mal thinks and can’t help but catalogue the pieces of it, like a movie reduced to photographic stills: the girl’s hands dropping to Eames’ hips, insistently tugging him closer; Eames turning his face to slide his teeth against her ear; the girl’s dark hair spilling sleek across her white, white coat; Eames brushing soft words and softer kisses against her mouth.

It’s so – something, Mal thinks, stares and stares and stares. She thinks that she probably shouldn’t be watching, but they’re in public and what is he even doing, there are people all around them, there’s a school aide _right there_ , and it’s not – he can’t actually _like_ her, Mal thinks. She looks like any other girl, pretty and hasn’t quite figured out how much makeup she needs, so her eyeliner is a bit too heavy and her lip gloss is a bit too pink; in summer, she’ll trade her coat for a gauzy little blouse, and Mal gets stuck on the image of a tank top strap sliding down a shoulder and Eames’ hand warm on the strip of skin where a shirt and the waistband of a skirt don’t quite meet.

Okay, Mal tells herself, it’s fine, it’s fine. This is what seventeen is, after all, and she’s just a little surprised because Eames has never mentioned this girl or any girl, and that’s – fine.

Across the street, Eames is backing away from the girl, hands shoved into his hoodie pockets, probably giving her one of his slow, bright smiles, and the girl is trying to hook her hands around his elbows, trying to make him stay. It’s sweet, is what it is, Mal thinks, and gets her phone out, dials. It rings four times and Eames answers on the fifth ring, leaning against the fence, the girl’s fingers idly twining with his.

“Hey,” he says, low and fond, and _fond_ , Mal thinks – who is that for.

“Hi,” she says. “Hey. I came to pick you up from school, so I wanted to catch you before you got on the bus; I’m right outside the junior parking lot, but I can’t—”

“Oh,” says Eames. “Oh, yeah, I see you. Just stay where you are.”

“Sure,” Mal says, but Eames has hung up already, is curling a strand of the girl’s dark hair around his finger like a silk ribbon, is saying something to her, pausing to kiss her every so often like commas interrupting a sentence. And then he’s crossing the street and Mal is looking determinedly at her phone when he’s knocking at her window, his cheeks flushed red from something that might be the wind.

“Hey, you,” he says when she rolls down the window. “What’s going on?”

“Dom got an invitation to present at a conference in Washington,” says Mal.

“Really?” Eames says, looking thrilled. “Does that mean we’re going to Washington?”

Eames looks so – _seventeen_ , she thinks, and says, “New York’s on the way. You can see it for real.”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Eames, grinning, and he leans through the window, kisses the corner of her mouth. It’s easy, the sort of kiss that Eames gives her when she snatches a cookie out of his hand and he chases her, tickles her until she’s breathless; it’s the sort of kiss that Mal brushes into Eames’ hair in the morning when she’s pouring his coffee.

It’s just that Mal can feel the sticky press of lip gloss against her skin.

“What?” Eames says when he draws away, must see the blankness of her face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Mal says. “Nothing at all.”

 

+

 

“I think you should talk to Eames about sex,” Mal says, three days later in the lab.

Dom looks up from his computer screen, looks a little hunted. “What?”

“Sex,” Mal says again, feeling a little hunted herself. “You should – talk to him about it.”

Because _someone_ has to, she doesn’t say, because Mal can’t stop thinking about it, has been thinking about it for the past three days: Eames stretched out on cool white sheets, his skin January-pale, his hands in someone’s glossy dark hair, the roll of soft skin, hips locking, breaths stuttering. And when they’re watching some shitty low-budget horror film, Eames’ hand carefully stroking through her hair, she can’t stop wondering where that hand’s been, who else Eames touches, who else touches Eames.

Mal says, “It’s just – responsible. You’re the authority figure and he’s probably feeling – confused and hormonal because he’s seventeen and he probably has – questions and you should answer them.”

Dom still looks a little alarmed. He needs a haircut, Mal thinks absently; tomorrow, maybe.

“I think he’s – probably figured everything out that there is to know,” Dom hedges.

“I know, but just knowing the mechanics doesn’t mean that he’ll know – what to do with – protection and everything,” Mal says and then feels herself blush, thinks, God, I can’t talk about this; it’s not that she’s embarrassed, exactly, but it’s _Eames_ , and she doesn’t want to think about him braced over some girl, his hand dipping low along the neckline of a silk dress, pulling gently until he finds the lacy curve of a bra.

“What?” Dom asks, looking thoroughly confused. “No, I mean – he’s probably already having sex.”

“What?” Mal asks, and stares at Dom across the lab bench.

Dom’s cell phone rings and he automatically reaches for it. “He’s seventeen, Mal. And look at the environment he grew up in: he had to deal with a lot of things that most adults never have to deal with. He’s not just some sheltered kid. He’s probably been having sex for at least a couple of years now.” Dom looks down at his phone and says apologetically, “It’s Will. I should probably take this.”

“Right,” says Mal. “No, of course, go ahead.”

“I can still talk to him, if you’re worried about it,” Dom says, and presses the talk button.

“No, it’s all right,” Mal says, but Dom is already talking into the phone, saying, hi, Will, yeah, I got your message— and Mal turns to look out the window, doesn’t think about anything at all.

 

+

 

Mal turns twenty-eight on a Saturday in February.

Dom wakes up early and goes out to the bakery, buys oven-warm chocolatines, and they spend the morning sitting around in bed, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. We got married four years ago today, Dom tells Eames, and Eames says, no, wait, you told me you _asked_ her to marry you on her birthday, and Dom laughs, says, I did, but you know Mal – the moment we woke up, she called us a cab and had it take us down to the county building.

Mal grins, tucks her foot into Dom’s lap. “My mother didn’t speak to me for three weeks after that.”

“She didn’t speak to me for three _months_ ,” Dom says mournfully.

“Well,” says Mal, and crawls over to Dom, kisses the curve of his jaw. “I’d wasted twenty-four years not being married to you,” she says, and sets a smile into his skin. “I didn’t want to waste any more time.”

By the time they finally make it out of bed, it’s noon and the sheets are a mess of chocolate and powdered sugar. Mal feels utterly content with the easy comfort of Dom disappearing into the kitchen to make sandwiches and Eames sitting up on the bathroom counter as she brushes her teeth. What do you want to do today, Eames asks, and she looks at him, at the way the mirrors chase him into infinity. Dom had asked him the same question on his birthday, and that seems like so long ago, like different people. She remembers the Eames that had said, I want to go dreaming, the halting way he’d said it, like he was used to being refused whatever he wanted. She remembers the worshipful way he’d looked at Dom, still looks at Dom, like Dom hung the sun and the stars and the moon.

Mal takes her toothbrush out of her mouth and says, “I want to go dreaming with you.”

 

+

 

They spend a day in Paris because all of Mal’s dreams eventually end up in Paris. This isn’t _real_ Paris, of course, Mal tells Eames as they wander through the Louvre. Most of these paintings aren’t in the Louvre at all; they’re in private collections or in different museums around the world, but I love them, so here they are. She takes them to the bookshop she used to spend hours in as a child, tucking herself between shelves and already dreaming about dreams. She takes them to the chocolatier and makes them sample one of everything until they all feel sick. She takes them to the little apartment she’d lived in until she’d moved to Chicago for university, shows Eames the way her bedroom window never quite slotted into place. I used to sneak in and out this way to meet boys, she admits, and Dom says, teasing, I’m mad with jealousy.

They wake up in the lab and Dom confesses, I’m hungry, so they pick up food and eat it in the car, the passenger seat pushed all the way flat so Mal can lie back and look up at the stars. “I’m happy,” she announces, because she is, almost heartbreakingly happy, and how can that be, she wonders, feeling so happy it hurts, but it does, and she thinks she could stay like this forever: just Eames and Dom and her.

“I’m glad,” Eames says indulgently, smoothing her hair out of her face.

Mal laces her fingers with his and looks up, likes the way his profile is silvered by moonlight.

“I’m glad you’re with us,” she says, and Eames leans down, kisses her forehead, and says,

“Me too.”

Mal wants to tell him about being heartbreakingly happy, wants to ask, is it the same for you, but then Dom is starting the car and Eames is saying something about cupcakes, so she doesn’t get the chance.

They pick up cupcakes from the grocery store and end up eating them on the couch. The frosting somehow gets everywhere: on Mal’s hands and Eames’ cheek and in Dom’s hair. How is that even possible, Mal wants to know, and Dom just grins at her, leaves a string of icing-covered kisses along her shoulder. He falls asleep not long afterwards, one hand still in the cupcake box, the frosting clumped in his hair. Mal feels sleepy too, warm with the certainty that they’ll wake up tomorrow morning and have bagels for breakfast, maybe watch a marathon of successively ridiculous Lifetime movies, cook dinner at the last minute as Eames does his math homework at the kitchen counter.

“Hey,” Eames says, nudging at her shoulder. “Hey, don’t fall asleep yet.”

“I’m tired,” Mal says, faintly protesting, but obediently opens her eyes.

Eames hands her a box neatly wrapped in leftover Christmas gift wrap. She looks down at it, the small shape of it in her hands. “You didn’t have to—”

“Mal,” Eames says, and covers her mouth with his hand. “Just open it.”

Mal does, slides a fingernail under the tape and peels back to find a necklace box with a satin blue ribbon tied around it lengthwise. She opens the box and— _oh_ , she thinks, and feels utterly blank. She can feel Eames at her side, his hand warm on her shoulder even through the cotton of her shirt, and – _happy_ , she’d thought only a few hours ago, but right now she feels too confused to even be happy.

“I know February is amethyst,” Eames says, sounding shy. “But your favorite color is blue, so—”

“It is,” says Mal, and gently trails a finger down the delicate chain; it gleams gold in the light.

Eames takes his hand off her shoulder, says uncertainly, “Do you not—”

“No, I just,” Mal says, and feels desperate: “Eames, this must have cost at least—”

“It’s not real,” Eames says quickly. “The chain isn’t even real gold; it’s gold plating over sterling silver.”

“Oh,” Mal says, and takes the necklace out of the box. “It _looks_ real.”

Eames’ laughter ghosts warm against her cheek. “Do you know much real sapphires cost?” he asks.

“Still,” she says, a little embarrassed and a little petulant and a little charmed by the thought of Eames saving up a couple months’ worth of his allowance and spending an hour in the jewelry department at Macy’s, trying to decide between a pair of earrings and a necklace, maybe. “Can you--?”

Eames takes the necklace from her and Mal pulls her hair away from the back of her neck, tilts her head down. He fiddles with the clasp for a second and then drops a kiss to the nape of her neck, says, “There,” and when she turns around, he gives her one of his slow, bright smiles and says, “happy birthday, Mal.”

“Yeah,” says Mal, soft, and she reaches out, touches the curve of his smile. “Yeah – it is.”

 

+

 

They take Eames out of school for a week and go see New York.

They go everywhere: they wander through the markets in the Upper West side and then drift into Central Park, not sure how they got there. They spend an hour in the Met and waste an entire day in the East Village, drinking sour lassis that burn on the way down. They get utterly lost on the subway, have to change trains five times before they realize that they’re only a block south from where they started. Dom shows them Columbia and the shitty-looking apartment he stayed in his last two years of college, looks up at the building and muses, I don’t remember it being so – _small_. Eames insists upon seeing the Statue of Liberty and then pretends he’s not bitterly disappointed when it turns out to be just a blur of copper-green in the distance; it could’ve been worse, he says diplomatically, and Mal links elbows with him, says, _how_ , you do realize that we’re in Staten Island now, right? They walk through SoHo, staring up at the cast-iron buildings that don’t quite fit together, like mismatched puzzle pieces, and they eat New York-style pizza and decide it’s better than Chicago deep dish. At night, they huddle into Times Square to watch the skies light up bright as day with neon pinks and electric blues, and then they wake up and do it all over again.

Because that’s the thing about New York, Dom says cheerfully over breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, when Mal and Eames are slumped against each other, running on about twenty hours of sleep debt: it’s the city that never sleeps.

You are a _horrible_ _human being_ , Mal informs him, and then orders them ten more cups of coffee.

They stay a day longer than planned in New York, and of course that means that they reach Washington twenty minutes before Dom is supposed to be all ready to go. He changes in the backseat and buttons up his shirt all wrong, just stares at the ends of his tie helplessly like he can’t possibly think of what to do with them. It’s all right, says Mal, feeling rather panicked herself, but Eames just says calmly, okay, I’ll take care of the buttons, you do the tie. After, Mal smoothes her hands down the lapel of Dom’s jacket, says, you’ll be wonderful, and means it, because Dom is kind of wonderful.

She clutches onto Eames’ hand all the way through the presentation, watches Dom grin a little bashfully at the audience, thinks, God, I’m so in love with him, when Dom starts talking – we all dream, he says, but the question is, how big can we dream? And Mal smiles and smiles so hard that it hurts.

Afterwards, they wind their way towards Dom, find him talking with an old colleague from Chicago.

“Marty, you remember my wife, Mal,” Dom says, and Marty, who turns out to be a weed-thin man wearing pleat-front trousers, a terrible checkered tie, and an even more terrible mustard yellow jacket, says pleasantly,

“Yes, yes, of course, hello.”

“And this is Eames,” Dom says. “Marty was doing his post-doc when I was doing my graduate work. We were just talking about dream levels; Marty actually wrote a rebuttal to Sanford’s paper last year – remember, about the second level being too unstable?” Dom looks happy, his suit jacket gone missing somewhere between here and the stage, and Mal can’t help but feel helplessly fond, says,

“Yes, I remember.”

“It feels like that was years ago,” Marty says. “I’ve switched back to neuro, now.”

“Really? Why?” Dom asks, looking deeply betrayed.

Marty drags a hand through his hair. “The government doesn’t have much money for dreams,” he says after a moment, a little sardonic. “Or, at least that’s what they tell me every time I apply for a grant and get rejected. But apparently they’ve got money for me to map brainwave activity in rats.” He grins, looks a bit embarrassed. “It’s fine. You know, as long as there are a couple people making progress – Sanford, that moron, for one, and you and Henderson, still – I don’t think the government will tamp down on dreaming completely. It’s just a matter of time. Research interests are still very cyclical. All we need is a breakthrough and then dream labs will pop up all over the place. Hey,” he says, and reaches out to pat Dom on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll even call you up and ask you to give me a spot in your lab.”

“I don’t know,” Dom says drily. “We’re a little full, what with our team of, let me count – two.”

Marty laughs and then there are other people to talk to, one by one like train cars on a track. Someone wants to know what Dom thinks about Sanford’s paper and another one wants to know _why_ Dom thinks what he thinks about Sanford’s paper. And then there’s someone who wants to know what Dom’s future research interests are, voice threaded through by a sliver of disdain, and Dom says sharply, dreams.

They don’t get out of the conference until an hour later, and by then it’s too late to begin the drive home. Dom drives around for a while, looking for a motel, his face slack with exhaustion and probably something else, and Mal hates this, wonders why dreams should make anyone feel like this.

“Hey,” she says, rests her palm lightly on Dom’s knee “You were always more talented than Marty. We’re still getting grants, and you heard him: the best people are still getting money.”

Dom slants a tired smile at her, the city traffic silhouetting him in gold. “Our budget is half of what it was two years ago,” he says, and Mal wants to ask, when did you become the practical one, feels a little frantic, because she’s tried so hard – hiding the bills and then the second and third notices of bills unpaid, dipping into her savings account when the university refuses to pay their travel expenses to conferences, writing letters to private corporations about Dom being the best there is, because she believes that, has always believed that – to stave off the moment when Dom realizes that maybe, just maybe, there’s no such thing as flying.

“We’ll get through it, though,” Dom continues. “No one ever said that this was going to be easy.”

No, no one ever did, Mal thinks, and closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see Washington pass them by.

 

+

 

February thaws into March, and there’s something about spring, something about the sun rising earlier, something about Dom going out without a scarf, about Eames shedding his winter paleness, his hair picking up threads of gold. March feels like the beginning of something, Mal thinks, feels like waking up.

They start to dream a little less, the days stringing into weeks, and that’s fine, Mal thinks as she watches Dom and Eames on the floor, math notes spread out all around them, and Eames somehow conning Dom into doing his homework for him. I feel like I’m doing your homework for you, Dom says suspiciously after twenty minutes have gone by, and Eames says brightly, that’s all right, I don’t mind. When they’re finished, they head outside to throw a baseball around. Come with us, Eames says, grabbing at Mal’s hands, and Mal laughs, says, I have to put the laundry away, but she walks them to the door, leans against the doorframe and watches them companionably shove at each other, arguing about the relative merits – or, lack of merits, according to Dom – of soccer.

And Mal thinks: what need have we for dreaming when reality is like _this?_

She’s in Eames’ room, putting his clothes away, when something on his desk makes her pause. For a moment she’s not sure what it is, because Eames’ desk is a mess of half-finished assignments and the little origami cranes he’s taken to making and leaving around the house. There are pages torn out of architecture magazines and idle, discarded sketches. There’s a fistful of crumpled up dollars and a few scattered pennies, but none of these things are particularly interesting, and Mal’s about to go back to the laundry when she sees it, half tucked under a book.

It’s a permission slip for the annual end-of-the-school-year field trip, and was apparently supposed to be turned in three days ago. Eames has already filled in his name and Mal’s emergency contact information, probably shoved it aside to show Mal and then forgot. And all that makes sense, Mal thinks, except for the fact that where the line for her signature should be blank, it – isn’t.

It’s her signature, Mal thinks, tracing the curve of the _M_ , the long, thin loops of the _l_ s. It’s familiar the way an old tee shirt fits, the way the cotton has run thin, the way she knows her front teeth are a little crooked without looking in the mirror. It’s _hers_ the way few things are, _just_ hers, except, Mal thinks, except, and she can’t breathe, can’t do much of anything except stare at her name staring back at her.

“Mal?” Eames says from the doorway, laughter ribboning through his voice. “Hey, Dom wants to go—”

“What is this?” Mal quietly asks, holds up the permission slip.

“Mal,” says Eames.

“Because it looks like my signature,” Mal says. “Except for the part where I didn’t sign this.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Eames says carefully. “I just—”

“I don’t understand,” Mal says, and she can’t look away from her name, there, _perfect_ , the way the dot over the _i_ stretches out into a thin line. “I would’ve signed it if you’d asked.”

“I know,” Eames says quickly. He comes closer, smells like wet grass and baseball leather. There’s a grass stain on his right hand and his jeans are ripped at the left knee, and Mal feels dizzy for a second, feels hurt and angry and breathless all at once, thinks about Eames sitting at his desk and practicing her name, practicing the slant of the _l_ s and the curve of the _C_ again and again, maybe using the carbon copy of an old check for reference. Who are you, Mal thinks, and hates this, hates it, the way Eames can be different people when Mal’s only ever been herself.

“Then _why?_ ” Mal says.

“I don’t _know_ ,” Eames says. “Mal, I really – I just – started _doing_ it and then it came out pretty well and it wasn’t – it’s not like you were going to tell me I couldn’t go—”

“Is this the first time?” Mal says, and doesn’t know what she’ll do if the answer isn’t _yes_.

“Yeah,” says Eames. “I haven’t been – Jesus, Mal, I wouldn’t—”

Right, is what Mal thinks, feels a sudden flare of helpless anger, and it’s – I’m overreacting, she tells herself, because it’s just a permission slip, it doesn’t _mean_ anything, but there it is. It’s like that time Eames got in a fight at school or the time she saw him kissing that girl, the way he’s probably had sex with her and never mentioned. It’s like Dom telling her, maybe we don’t know Eames as well as we think we do, and it’s like Eames telling her softly, who I am in dreams, that’s not me, Mal. Well then, she wants to know, who are you, because every time she thinks she gets it sorted out, every time Mal lets herself think that she knows him, Eames does something like this, and all she wants is to _know_ ; that’s all she’s ever wanted. She wants to peel the shell of seventeen off him, wants to know where seventeen ends and where Eames begins. She wants it so badly that it feels _obscene_ , and – obscene, Mal thinks, _obscene_ , what does that even _mean?_

“How am I supposed to know,” Mal says flatly, “what you would and wouldn’t do?”

Eames’ face flickers like a television set, going from neutral to blazingly angry in one knife-sharp second. “I wouldn’t do anything to _hurt_ you,” he says, the consonants short enough that he’s almost spitting. “Christ, it’s just a permission slip; you’re overreacting.” And then he reaches out, catches Mal’s wrist, and it’s so familiar, because Eames has done it a hundred times before, except that was a different Eames, wasn’t it, because Eames isn’t like Dom, isn’t safe and predictable, and she remembers thinking that Eames was like a tiger pretending to be tame, and _how_ , she thinks, again and again and again, how am I supposed to know who you are when you’re two different people?

Mal stares at Eames’ hand around her wrist and says, hopelessly honest, “I want to know who you are.”

“Mal,” says Eames, a little desperate, and she looks at him, looks and looks, because she knows his face as well as she knows hers or Dom’s, knows that he always misses the same spot on his jaw when he shaves, knows that his smile is a little crooked, that there’s a dimple in his right cheek if you get him to smile hard enough. There’s a shiny pink burn that might be from a cigarette high on his chest, a lacy web of scars here, a tattoo branded against his hip, more scars crisscrossing his knee, and she knows all that, knows about the freckles that spill over his shoulders, a line of three of them up his spine. She knows how coarse the hair on his chest is and how fine the hair on his head is and it’s just – it’s like having pieces of him but having no idea how to put it together and she wants to put him together, wants it so badly.

“Mal,” says Eames again, and Mal lifts the hand that’s in Eames’ hold, traces the line of Eames’ jaw. Eames goes stiff and Mal is utterly fascinated by all of it, the way his eyes shutter closed and the way his mouth parts a little, and this must be another moment, she tells herself. “You do know me,” Eames says, and Mal’s fingers brush against the curve of his lower lip; it’s a little chapped. “Mal, you do.”

“Okay,” Mal says, hushed, and – _here is a moment_ , and she thinks—

“Mal,” calls Dom from the hallway, and Eames is gone, is stumbling back, face completely blank.

Mal stares at her hand, still curled around the shape of Eames’ face in the air like clutching at a memory.

“There you two are,” Dom says, and comes into the room. “What’s that?”

Mal looks down at the permission slip in her hand then at Eames, standing near the bed, hands shoved into his pockets, looking determinedly everywhere but at her, and Mal thinks – what just happened? She’s not angry anymore, maybe wasn’t ever really angry, but she’s something, something – else. She doesn’t know what it is, but it’s like electric shocks set into her blood, like tiny needles clawing at her skin.

She hands Dom the permission slip, feels so, so tired. “Eames forged my signature.”

She doesn’t know what she expects from Dom, Dom, who will be the good cop to Mal’s bad cop when they have children, who will be the one the children run to when they want sweets before dinner or money for ice cream. But what she doesn’t expect is for Dom to stare at the signature, for one moment to pass, and then another, until her pulse doesn’t feel so frantic, skittering wildly right under her skin.

“This is very good,” Dom says finally. Eames looks startled.

“Sorry?” Eames says.

Dom grins, slow and easy. “I think I have an idea.”

 

+

 

“Tell me how you did this,” Dom says, and taps a finger against Mal’s signature.

“I don’t know,” says Eames, a little insolent.

They’re in the living room. Eames is on the couch, his fingers furled into fists that are resting lightly against his thighs. He looks a little dangerous, shoulders hunched, looks like he’s waiting for Dom to read out his verdict. He looks, Mal thinks, like he had a year ago, when Mal had dragged Dom into the kitchen, had said, where did you even _find_ him, and Dom had said wonderingly, Mal, he can _forge_.

“What were you thinking while you did it?” Dom presses.

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” Eames says. “I just copied it. It wasn’t hard.”

Dom goes quiet for a moment. He’s sitting on the coffee table, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s say you were going to forge my signature. What would you do differently?”

“I don’t know,” Eames says, frustrated. “I guess I’d – Mal’s handwriting is like her: neat and careful, the way they teach you in school. Yours is, I don’t know – the letters are separated and angular. I think it’s probably because you write in all block letters in the lab, and you’ve got used to it.”

“So, you couldn’t approach my signature the way you’d approach Mal’s,” Dom says, reasonable.

“No,” Eames allows, a little uncertain.

“In fact,” Dom says, “it’s an entirely different thought process. If you’re going to forge Mal’s signature, you have to think like Mal; if the forgery is going to pass for the real thing, the whole point of it is to be as close to the real thing as possible. And that’s not just copying – it’s a whole different field altogether; it’s psychology. You have to know who the person is, _why_ she writes the way she does. For all intents and purposes, for you to do the forgery properly, you have to _become Mal_.”

Eames casts a sideways glance at Mal and then looks quickly away, like he hadn’t meant to. And – what is that, Mal wonders, feels like she’s caught on to the periphery of something, but when she looks at it head-on, it’s still blurry. And there was a moment back in Eames’ room, one singular moment separate from the rest, where she’d thought that maybe, maybe, she’d been about to figure it out. But Eames is carefully ignoring her, only has eyes for Dom, and that – it feels like she’s been slotted away, deliberately forgotten, and – and it feels like being stranded on a tiny island with only miles and miles of ocean surrounding her.

Dom says, “Do you know what method acting is?”

“Yeah,” says Eames. “It’s where actors try to feel what the characters feel.”

“Exactly,” Dom says, hands Eames the permission slip. Eames takes it from him, still looking unsure. “It’s where the actor tries to _become_ the character. Because, if you can feel what the character feels, if you can understand the character – it makes it easier for you to represent the character. And logically, forgery should be the same way. If you can understand that Mal is neat and that in school her teachers emphasized learning cursive – so much so that still writes her letters the same way – then your forgery is going to be better than if you’re just copying it.”

“Dom,” Eames says, curious. “What are you getting at?”

Dom grins. “Eames. Why do we call what you can do in dreams _forgery_?”

“Because you’re not yourself,” Eames says, but Dom shakes his head, says,

“But, think about it. You forged in London. The kid you forged, who is he?”

“I don’t,” Eames says, ducks his head a bit. “I don’t know. I saw him on the Tube once.” Dom looks expectant and Eames’ mouth twists, sardonic. “He looked at me like – I don’t know, the way you step on gum and then try to find something to scrape it off. You know, nice trousers, good teeth. He just – I figured—” and he stuffs his hands into his pockets, stares hard at the floor. “Look,” he says, ragged, like Dom’s yanking the words out of him, a long string of a sentence. “You wanted someone who could be something, and you weren’t going to get that from me as I was. So I tried – to be _him_ , the sort that you wouldn’t think twice about taking with you.”

Mal looks and looks and looks at him, feels— “Eames,” she says, can’t help it.

“Don’t,” says Eames, fierce. “Don’t. I don’t want – that.”

“Okay,” Dom says lightly, because he always knows what to say, even when Mal’s heart has skipped up to her throat, even when she feels so small, because – _who are you_ , she’d asked, and how incredibly stupid of her, because the thing about being seventeen and the thing about being _Eames_ , Eames, who’d picked out Dom as an easy target, who’d wanted so hard to be someone with nice trousers and good teeth, of all things – the thing about being Eames is that he might pretend to be someone else in dreams, but that’s only because he wants to be someone else in real life. _Who are you_ , Mal had asked, and this is Eames’ answer: _I don’t know_.

“But when we go under at the lab,” Dom says. “Who do you forge?”

“I – no one,” Eames says, and looks surprised. “I don’t think about it that way.”

“I don’t either,” Dom admits. “Which is ironic, because we’ve even been _calling_ it forgery. Dreaming operates on a subconscious level and the subconscious can’t exist without the conscious level. The subconscious integrates things that we don’t register on the conscious level: people we sit by on the subway, the TV playing in the background. Dreams – real, natural dreaming – is not infinite. We don’t make things from pure scratch in dreams: otherwise, we’d wake up. Everything is drawn from things we’ve experienced, either knowingly or unknowingly.”

“I’ve dreamed that I can fly, wings and all,” Mal says. “That’s not an experience.”

Dom grins at her; he’s a mess of contrasts right now: there’s a streak of dirt on the sleeve of his sweater and he’s tapping at the coffee table like he wants his computer. His hair is rumpled, looks stick-dry with cooling sweat, and he’s squinting a little, on the verge of needing glasses.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered what it would feel like, to be able to fly,” Dom says. “An experience doesn’t have to be something happening to you. It can be a passing thought. And what you’d notice, if you were able to calculate how long each of your dreams lasted, is that the more unbelievable the dream is, the shorter it lasts. Even your subconscious can only tolerate so much impossibility.”

Dom looks at Eames. “Forging isn’t just about you changing your appearance. That’s too difficult; you have too many choices and, more than that, you don’t know how to put it together. You can forge grey hair and a green shirt and brown pants, but think of how much that allows for. The subconscious likes real experiences. Forgery doesn’t work if you approach it like you’re just changing your appearance. Forgery isn’t about not being yourself; it’s about _becoming someone else_.”

Eames says, “I want to go to the lab.”

“Yeah,” Dom says, and pulls his car keys out of his pocket. “I thought you might.”

 

+


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: underage
> 
> Thank you: to dialectical, who lets me talk at her about this fic for hours on end, workshopped this, beta-ed this, and is basically the reason that I'm still writing-- if only because she won't let me give up on this ♥

It works, a little.

“He goes to my school,” Eames says, looking into the mirror. “But it’s not – quite right,” he admits, and Mal can see that, because while Eames’ hair has bleached into white-blond, while his shoulders have narrowed and his face has rounded out, there are still pieces of Eames there. Those are still Eames’ eyes, that shade where grey brightens into green; those are still his hands, bigger than you’d expect; it’s still his mouth, and it’s– so _bizarre_ , Mal thinks, looks up at the sky so she doesn’t have to see.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Dom says. “Try someone else.”

Eames smiles.

 

 

+

 

 

They take the PASIV device home with them so Eames can practice forging.

“It’s not _stealing_ ,” Dom explains.

“Then why did Eames have to distract the security guard while we wheeled it out the door?” Mal asks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dom says, lofty, and Mal laughs, kisses his cheek. She turns around in her seat to – she doesn’t know, to just look at Eames, maybe, because she doesn’t like the way he’d become someone else in the dream and that’s – that’s stupid, she tells herself, because the whole point is to forge someone else, but for some reason, for some reason she just needs to _look_.

“Hey,” she says, soft.

He looks at her, the city lights sliding across one cheek. “Hey,” he says cautiously.

“You’re kind of wonderful,” she says, and means I’m sorry and I trust you and everything else she still doesn’t know how to say. I love you, maybe, and the way you can sleep through five alarms and miss the bus at least three times a week; the way you can’t get your head around pre-calculus and the way your studio art teacher keeps pushing you to make a career out of art; the way you smile, and, and, there’s more, and all of it is so – so _much_ and it’s just _so much_ and how lonely she was before Eames came into her life, Eames, who is infuriating and lovely and makes her laugh and makes her heart beat fast when he does stupid things, Eames, who fills in all those spaces she didn’t know were empty. You’re kind of wonderful, she thinks, and she’s said it to Dom so many times, because somehow it’s more than I love you, because _love_ , that’s so – it’s not enough, can’t come close to explaining the way her heart feels like it might burst in her chest.

She expects him to smile. Expects him to lean forward, kiss the curve of her ear, maybe.

But Eames just looks so, so tired, looks a little miserable. “Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Thanks.”

She thinks about that, strings it along into the next day while she’s standing in the kitchen, waiting for the rice to boil. Yeah, Eames had said, and – you’re kind of wonderful, she’d said, and it had _meant_ something to her, had felt like a confession being ripped out of her, and they were just _words_ , four careful words, but – _yeah_ , he’d said, not flippant, exactly, but miserable, and _miserable_ , she thinks, viciously stirring the rice. I’m so _sorry_ that I make you _miserable_ , and it’s so – _overreacting_ , Eames had said, but she can’t help it, feels so helpless, because loving Dom is quiet and unassuming, all slow, easy smiles and fixing his scarf, fretting because every winter without fail he comes down with a cold. Loving Dom is like dreaming up Paris, knowing every meandering street and yet always finding a new shop here, a charming little garden there. But Eames – loving Eames is like walking on eggshells, like her emotions have lengthened by two octaves in each direction. Eames is like a big brass band, the way you can hear it even from miles and miles away, and, and _love_ , she thinks again and again, it’s not the way she loves Dom but it’s – something.

She’s draining the rice when Eames comes in, looking a little crazy.

“Mal,” he says, catching her wrist. “Mal, come with me.”

“What?” she asks, feeling startled because Eames hasn’t said anything to her for the whole day, had already been shut up in his room when she’d got home from the museum. She’d knocked on his door, waited one, two, three beats and – he’s dreaming in there, she’d thought, sprawled out on his bed, shirt sleeves rolled up, the long thin line of the IV snaking towards the PASIV device.

“Mal,” Eames says insistently. “Come on, come on.”

“All right,” she says, and lets herself be dragged to Eames’ room. “Are we going dreaming?” she asks, and remembers an hour ago, remembers staring at the door handle, wanting to go in, to go dreaming with him, wondering if she could just – slide under with him, just so things could be as quiet and easy as they are in their dreams. She remembers thinking, I could just go in, just lie down next to him, and. And.

Eames bends over the PASIV, flashes a smile at her. “Do you trust me?”

Do I _trust_ you, Mal thinks, thinks of that permission slip, and – “Yes,” she says.

Eames says quietly, “Dream with me, Mal,” and she thinks, _yes_ , closes her eyes, goes to sleep.

 

 

+

 

 

She’s waiting for a train in London.

     “It’s a foggy day in London town, where the streets are grey and bare.  
      It’s a foggy day in London town, ‘cause the sun don’t shine nowhere.”

Mal says, “That’s not how the song goes.”

Dom grins at her, looking ridiculously pleased at being caught out. “I like my way better.”

“I hate that blazer,” she says, because it feels absolutely necessary to inform him of this.

“Do you,” Dom says, amused, and Mal says,

“Where’s the train? I’m late for—”

“What,” Dom says quietly, and she looks at him, looks and looks. “What are you late for?”

“I don’t,” she says, and stops. “I don’t know.”

Dom says, “The first time I saw you, I thought you were like one of those impossible staircases. I could go around and around forever and I’d never reach the top. And then, even if I somehow reached it, I thought, she’s not going to be there because – because,” he says, shoves his hands in his pockets, looks around the empty platform and – empty, Mal thinks, that’s not right, is it, but Dom’s talking again: “And you try to stop wanting things that you’re never going to have because all it does is mess up the things that you _do_ have. So you try to just – forget about it, file it away.”

“Dom,” says Mal. “Why is there no one else here?”

Dom says, “It’s the way you laugh and the way you think you can fix everything: the late bill payments, the car when it breaks down, even though you don’t know anything about cars. Your cooking is terrible most days and you always burn the fish and yet somehow it’s always the best thing I’ve ever eaten. It’s the way you sing in the shower and I always think that someone is actually being mauled to death outside and the way you stay up all night worrying about money and then pretend you didn’t the next morning.”

“I’m waiting for the train,” says Mal.

And he says, “Except it’s not any of that.”

And he says, “I don’t want to want this. Do you see?”

“I’m waiting,” Mal says. “For something.”

He smiles, gently curves his palm around her cheek and she shuts her eyes, leans into his hand, and that’s funny, she thinks, because they’re in a train station and it should smell like – like something else, she thinks, not like the well-loved blandness of paper and the acridity of India ink.

“The thing is,” he says, hushed. “You’re kind of wonderful, Mal.”

And she thinks, we’re in a train station in London town, why are we in a train station in London town, why, why, why, but then he’s kissing her, sweet and slow, and she thinks, this is something new, and—

Mal opens her eyes and says, “Eames?”

Dom’s face goes blank, terribly blank. “Shit,” he says, and it sounds utterly wrong and she stares at her hand knotted in the collar of his shirt, stares and stares. “I’m _sorry_ , I didn’t – I don’t know why I—”

“Change back,” Mal says, her voice just a hard thin line. “Eames.”

And then it _is_ Eames, just Eames, his ugly checkered blazer dissolved into the light blue shirt he’d been wearing topside, the horrible olive trousers giving way to jeans. He doesn’t smell like paper and ink, doesn’t smell like anything at all, really, not even aftershave or sweat.

“Mal,” Eames says desperately. “I know you don’t want—”

Mal kisses him.

 

 

+

 

 

Because, she thinks, all those moments – they have to go somewhere, don’t they.

 

 

+

 

 

Dream with me, he’d said.

You’re kind of wonderful, he’d said.

You try to stop wanting things, he’d said.

And Mal had said: I’m waiting for something.

 

 

+

 

 

They wake up.

 

 

+

 

 

He did it, Mal tells Dom. He forged. It was – perfect.

I can show you, Eames offers quietly.

He looks at Mal, shy. Do you want to come?

What, Mal says, startled. No – no.

 

 

+

 

 

Three days later, Dom submits a paper on dream forgery.

Two days after that, the military shows up on their doorstep.

 

 

+

 

 

Apparently one of the higher-ups in the military is interested in dream forgery, but not so interested that he actually comes in person, so it’s a second lieutenant who comes knocking on their door at nine-thirty on Monday morning. He’s young, Mal thinks, and military in the way that Mal has always thought of military: all closely cropped hair and neat slacks and so unfailingly polite that it almost seems rude. He looks around the lab disinterestedly, pulls a small notebook out of his pocket.

How fitting, Mal thinks, that they send someone with no imagination to talk to us about dreams.

He starts talking about contracting and a mutually beneficial relationship and laying the groundwork for the future, wonderful words that go a little dry with the flat-toned delivery. He uses terms that Mal has never heard of before – _dreamshare_ , for one, and _artificial dreaming_ , for another – and _artificial_ , what does that even mean, Mal wonders, because there’s nothing artificial about colorful gondolas that snake along the canals of Venice or a bridge gleaming rust-gold through the San Francisco fog.

“We’re interested in seeing whether artificial dreaming can be used for – practical applications,” he says.

“Practical applications,” Mal says. “Like what, exactly? War?”

He looks at her mildly. “Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to go into that, Mrs. Cobb.”

Dom drags a hand through his hair, uncertain. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant—”

“Just ‘Arthur’ is fine, Mr. Cobb,” he says, and Dom agreeably says,

“I’m sorry, Arthur, but I don’t think I understand what it is you want from us.”

Arthur shuts his notebook, caps his pen, leans forward. He looks young, Mal thinks, military-young, a twenty-one that looks like it’s on the other side of twenty-five. “To speak plainly,” he says, “artificial dream research doesn’t attract a lot of funding. There are reasons for that, namely the fact that there hasn’t been a significant breakthrough in something like ten years. What use does the public have for artificial dreaming? Sure, there’s the novelty of it, but what you have here is essentially a product with no marketing potential.”

“Which makes me wonder why you’re here,” Mal interrupts, a little vicious. Arthur looks steadily at her.

“I’m here because my superiors think we might be able to use your technology. What we’re offering is something that you sorely need: money. The irony of the situation is that the less grant money you get, the less likely it is that you’ll ever reach that much needed breakthrough.” Arthur thumbs through the file he’d brought with him, the small letters blurring into thin dark lines. “Instead of applying for grant money, you would go through us. You’ll get what funds and equipment you require, within reason, and in return, we are kept fully apprised about your progress.”

Dom is silent for a moment. “That’s a surprisingly generous offer.”

Arthur’s smile is almost rueful. “I’m not quite done, sir. I’ll be acting as your liaison in this project. Part of my job will be to report your results or, as the case may be, lack of results, to my superiors. But the other part of my job – and our agreement – is that you teach me how to artificially dream.”

“ _You_ want to learn how to dream?” Mal says, startled.

Arthur straightens. “For me to be able to write up thorough reports, yes, I’ll need you to teach me the ins and outs of dreamshare.”

“Mal,” says Dom quietly, but Mal can’t help herself.

“Not everyone can dream, Lieutenant. It takes natural talent. Imagination.”

“You think I don’t have an imagination,” Arthur says, sounding amused.

“I think,” says Mal, “that you drink your coffee black and eat the same thing for dinner every night. I think you’ve probably wanted to join the military ever since you were five years old and you’re annoyed that your first big assignment is having to write reports on something you don’t believe in. I think you dream in black-and-white and read books by Dostoyevsky because you think that’s what you should read. You probably studied something _practical_ in college – chemical engineering, maybe. Math.”

“Christ,” Dom mutters, looking harassed.

“Very good, Mrs. Cobb,” Arthur says after a beat. “Except it was materials engineering.”

“Same thing,” Mal says, dismissive.

Arthur gives a wry smile. “Is this your way of telling me you decline our offer?”

“Well,” says Mal, and looks over at Dom. “That’s not what I said, is it?”

 

 

+

 

 

“Arthur wants to meet you,” Dom says, leaning against the counter, finishing off a pint of ice cream.

Eames doesn’t look up. He’s sitting at the table, doing his math homework. “Okay.”

Dom looks over at him, considering. “You’ve been quiet these past few days. Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” Eames says too brightly. “Just – you know. Had a history exam today.”

Dom looks a little amused, but he doesn’t say anything. He puts the ice cream container on the counter and comes up behind Mal, and it’s too hot, she thinks; the fan is whirring lazily in the corner, valiantly trying to make up for the fact that she refuses to turn on the air conditioning until May. Dom’s hands, though, are freezing through the worn cotton of her tee shirt, and she shudders, thinks of the time she tried to put a hot thermometer in cold water to cool it down, remembers how it shattered.

“I’m going to bed,” Dom says, kissing the curve of her shoulder, and Mal doesn’t think about anything at all, just watches her knuckles go white around the sponge, the soap bubbles spill across her fingers.

“Put the container in the trash,” she says, like someone’s set her on automatic.

“Okay,” Dom says, light, and she listens to him say goodnight to Eames, listens to him leave.

Mal turns on the tap, thinks that if she can layer this sound over the whirr of the fan and the click of the buttons on the calculator, the faraway ticking of the clock in the living room, if she can concentrate on the peal of a car horn outside, the low hum of the refrigerator, then she won’t have to hear Eames’ breaths, silent except for the way she’s learned to pick them out, like plucking a single note out of a melody.

“Mal,” says Eames, and she almost drops a glass.

“What?” she says. It comes out brittle, whip-sharp.

Eames says, quiet, “I want to fix this. Tell me how I can fix it.”

“There’s nothing to fix,” Mal says. “Nothing happened.”

“You won’t even look at me,” Eames says, sounding wretched, and she shuts her eyes. “It’s been four days and you won’t even _look_ at me, you won’t talk to me, you won’t stay in the same room as me—”

“That’s not true,” Mal says, and that’s a lie, because last night she and Dom had been watching a movie and Eames had come home late, his sleeves pushed up around his elbows and the top three buttons of his shirt undone, and he’d looked so— and Dom had said, hey, come watch with us, and Eames had looked at her for one, two, three seconds too long, and she’d thought, what are you even doing, you don’t get to do that, had felt insane and sick, and she’d excused herself, had locked herself in the bathroom and climbed into the tub, had put her head between her knees so she could just _breathe_.

“Should I – do you want me to leave?” Eames says, and Mal finally looks at him, the way his head is bowed and his shoulders are hunched, and he’s only seventeen, she thinks, _seventeen_ , and she’d thought that she could forget, it was only a dream, but she feels sick all over again, sick and a little hysterical, because the thing about dreams is that you’re supposed to forget them when you wake up, but she _can’t_ , can’t forget the feeling of cotton fisted in her hand, the slow shift of a throat, the teasing slide of a button.

And _leave_ , she thinks, almost wants to laugh, because where would he even go, and why would he think that she’d _let_ him go; it was a mistake, an enormous, terrible _mistake_ , and she’d just been – confused, because he’d been Dom and then he wasn’t Dom, and she’d been waiting for a train, waiting and waiting and it had never come. She feels like she’s unraveling, because he’s _seventeen_ and she’s supposed to make sure there’s food on the table and that his homework is done, not – not anything more than that, there’s love and then there’s _love_ , and there’s _Dom_ , and she feels dizzy, because _Dom_ , and how long has this even been going on? It’s like she has to reexamine every moment, every memory, under a new light because maybe the girl she’d imagined Eames kissing, his hands knotting in dark hair – maybe that girl had always had Mal’s face.

“ _No_ ,” Mal says, “it’s not your – it wasn’t _real_ , Eames. It was only a dream.”

Eames pushes his chair back. The floor lets out a pathetic whine. “Then why won’t you _look_ —”

“ _Because you’re seventeen_ ,” Mal yells. “Because I _took advantage of you_ , you’re seventeen and I’m twenty-eight and I don’t – I don’t love you like that, Eames, I’m not _supposed to love you like that_ , I’m not supposed to want— it can’t have been real, because otherwise that means—”

“Advantage,” Eames says flatly. “You think you took advantage of me.”

Mal doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or cry, feels so exhausted. “I did.”

“Mal,” Eames says, and he’s right in front of her now, when did that happen?

“I’m not in _love_ with you,” Mal says desperately, and thinks that if Eames kisses her, she’ll—

“Okay,” says Eames finally, light as air. “I know that. I didn’t think you were.”

“Okay,” says Mal. “Okay, good. And it’s not like – those things you said, you didn’t mean any of them, it didn’t – mean anything. You were just – being Dom.”

“Right,” Eames says, unhappy, and Mal thinks – I did that to him.

“Eames,” she says, reaches for his hand, stops, starts, stops. “I’ll fix this, I promise, I’ll fix it—”

“Yeah,” Eames says, and stuffs his hands into his pockets, takes them out again. “No, that’s – fine.”

“Okay,” she says, and this is the part where she would normally touch him, curl her fingers in the collar of his shirt, kiss the corner of his mouth, say, hey, everything’s going to be all right. But Eames smells like the peanut butter he eats straight out of the jar and the kitchen is quiet even with the fan going on and on and on, and she can count Eames’ breaths, thinks she can even count his heartbeats, and she can say that she’d been confused, that she’d been waiting for a train that had never come, but it’s just Eames right now, _just_ Eames, and it had always just been just Eames, hadn’t it, Eames, who makes her laugh, who makes her feel wrecked and insane. It’s always been Eames, Eames, who is telling her that it’s okay to pretend that none of it mattered, and what am I even doing, she thinks, and can I make one more mistake, am I _allowed to?_ Dom is probably sleeping already and Mal could just – could just touch Eames’ hip and he’d let her – _you try to file it away_ , he’d said, and it hadn’t worked, won’t work now, because Mal has tried to file it away. Four days, four days of being utterly miserable and pretending as hard as she can that she wasn’t, but this isn’t artificial dreaming, there’s no such thing as _artificial_ dreaming.

I want, she thinks, limitless as a dream, but they’re not dreaming anymore, are they.

“Eames,” she says.

Eames says, “You should go to bed, Mal. Dom’s waiting for you.”

“Right,” she says, and thinks, Dom, Dom’s waiting for me, _Dom_ , and doesn’t watch Eames leave.

 

 

+

 

 

“Are you and Eames all right?” Dom asks softly, peeling back the covers so he can kiss her properly.

Mal traces the tired line of his jaw, her fingertip catching at the corner of his mouth. “Of course we are.”

Dom hums sleepily, shares a breath with her. “Just be patient with him. He’s only seventeen.”

“I know that,” Mal says, and thinks this must be what a heart attack feels like, that long drawn-out moment between one beat and the next, the way you feel weighed down and helpless, like you’re at confession and all your sins have caught up to you.

“Okay,” Dom says, easy, kisses her carefully.

“Okay,” she says, and curls her hands around the hem of his tee shirt, holds on tight.

 

 

+

 

 

It’s a crush, she tells herself, just a stupid, wildly inappropriate crush. Except you don’t get crushes on people you already love, and _love_ , she needs to stop thinking that, except it _is_ love, isn’t it, because this is what love is: knowing how he likes his coffee and making pot roast for dinner three nights in row just because it’s his favorite. Love is staying up all night with him because he forgot to do an English project that’s due in the morning and fighting over what movie to watch and stealing food off each other’s plates and sitting quietly together on the back porch, watching the thunderstorm. Love is the way he leaves little paper cranes around the house, sneaks them into her purse, on top of the coffeemaker. And if all that is love, if love is infinite and all-encompassing, then there’s no room for anything else. There’s no room for Dom and his quiet smiles, his hand warm on her cheek. It means there’s no room for sneaking out of conferences early to get ice cream, and it means there’s no room for shaking her awake at six o’clock in the morning so he can kiss her against the sunrise. _No room_ , she thinks, and feels hysterical, loving Eames means she can’t love Dom, but she _does_ , loves the way he laughs, the way he looks at her, like she’s something sacred and well-loved. Love, she thinks, the whole point of love is how vast it is, like standing on a beach and watching the sea stretch out until it becomes the sky and doubles back, vast and dizzying and infinite. And _infinite_ , she thinks, infinite, does that mean it never ends, is it like an infection, something that gets into your blood like a parasite, the memory of it ingrained into your very cells? Does that mean it’ll always be like this, Eames trying so hard not to look at her and looking anyway? Does that mean that when they pass each other in the hallway, her hand will always brush his, like a compass needle being drawn to north? And it was just a dream, she tells herself and tells herself, so that means it wasn’t real, but it had all felt so real, hadn’t felt like a dream at all, because in dreams you don’t remember the way he’d said your name, soft as a secret. You don’t remember the little sounds he’d made or the way his fingers had curled around yours. You don’t remember your dreams, Mal thinks, not when you wake up. But she can’t stop remembering, and that won’t go away, not even when she says to Dom in the middle of the night, can we--? and Dom is moving against her, face buried in her shoulder, and she feels breathless under the heavy weight of him, surrounded by him – but it doesn’t go away even then, because she thinks about Eames down the hall, remembers dinner, the way they’d reached for the water pitcher at the same time, the way his wrist had knocked against hers and it had _hurt_ but neither of them had moved for a moment and— and then Dom is saying her name in a litany that goes on and on and on, and she lets him kiss her to sleep, and in the morning when she wakes up, dry-eyed, Dom doesn’t notice. Loving Eames feels a lot like guilt, and not touching him is as bad as actually doing it, because she wants to touch him, wants it so badly that it makes her feel insane when Eames comes home late and she’s sitting in the kitchen because she can’t sleep and Eames says quietly, hi, and, were you waiting for me, and Mal feels hopelessly honest, says, yes, no, I didn’t mean it like that – even though she does. Eames says, I don’t ever want to hurt Dom, but he’s stroking her hair and Mal catches his wrist, kisses his palm, says, this is okay, right, I can do this, and Eames says eagerly, yeah, that’s – that’s okay. And Mal thinks, you’re a liar, but they’re both liars, so he doesn’t move away when she kisses his wrist, up his forearm, the crease of his elbow. And Mal doesn’t move away when he gently presses her up against the counter, because he knows she likes it like this. He kisses her, soft, one kiss and then two and three and four and then she stops counting because you don’t sit there and count your sins. Mal, he murmurs, Mal, and she lets him peel her shirt off, lets his fingers drift over her cotton bra, likes the way he kisses the swell of her breast, his mouth sliding red across her stomach. Let me, she says desperately, let me kiss you, I just want to— and he’s eager for that, too, helps her get his shirt off, grins lazily at her when she takes a moment to look, just to look. This should feel wrong, she thinks, utterly sure, but none of it feels wrong, because that’s the thing about love: it never feels wrong. Just once, she says, just tonight – like that’s penance enough for the fact that Dom is sleeping upstairs, weighed under by cough medicine, like it’s penance for the fact that Eames is seventeen and just a kid. But Eames’ hand is low on her back and he’s coaxing the strap of her bra down her shoulder, is letting her tremble against him, is saying, Mal, shh, Mal, and this is _real_ , she thinks, this is so, so real; Eames’ palms are a little sweaty and when he goes to kiss her again, it’s a little awkward because they both go left, but then he laughs and they find their rhythm, get it right. And Eames says, how far do you want to go, how far can we go, and Mal shuts her eyes so she doesn’t have to see Eames look at her like that, the way Dom looks at her. Just this, she says, I can’t – no more than this. Okay, Eames says, simply, not pressing, because you don’t get to choose your morals the way you do your sins. Okay, he says, okay, and Mal kisses him, and it doesn’t feel like sinning at all.

 

 

+

 

 

It turns out that Arthur can dream; he just can’t build.

“Let’s go back to the simplest possible structure,” Dom says.

They’re in Arthur’s dream, but it’s like no dream that Mal has ever seen before: it’s not like Dom’s New York, the inlaid geometry of the subway running under the city and the skyscrapers disappearing above. It isn’t like Mal’s Paris, cherry blossoms catching in a pitcher of lemonade and the edges soft and blurry because her Paris doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a dream. And it’s nothing like Eames’ London, an empty train station that smells like metal wheels hissing along a metal track because Eames has always been more interested in the details. Arthur’s dream is what Mal imagines oblivion would be like if it were pitched white: there aren’t any walls here, no landscape or buildings or projections. It’s just white, like staring directly into the sun.

“A building is four walls and a roof,” Dom says. “That’s it. Now, how would you build that?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur says. “I guess you’d take concrete and—”

“No,” says Dom. “That’s the thought process you’d use in reality, where you have to obey the rules of physics. Gravity. In a dream, there’s none of that. You make the rules in a dream. You decide what’s important, but you only have so much focus. You can’t tell yourself that a bridge exists because you’re balancing loads or arches are being used to distribute weight. Because then, the moment you turn your focus away, the bridge collapses.”

“Then how do you build it in the first place?” Arthur asks, sounding frustrated.

“A bridge is a bridge,” Dom says. “You have to trust that. If the bridge is there for you to cross a river, then all it has to do is hold you up as you cross. If it’s there because you’re in San Francisco and the skyline doesn’t look right without it, then all that matters is the color. Focus on the important things. Otherwise, the more detail you put into it, the more energy you’re expending.”

“No,” Arthur says. “We were in your dream yesterday and it was incredibly detailed. Mrs. Cobb’s—”

“You can only use what’s available to you,” Mal says. “When Dom builds New York, he’s drawing from his memory. That’s why the details hold up. When I build, I’m drawing from a love of architecture. I trust in that, so the dream stays stable. Dreams may be infinite, but they stem from what you know. So the question is, Lieutenant,” she says, and only half means it to be a challenge. “What do you know?”

Arthur closes his eyes. Around them, the white gives way to color, like the generous lines of a coloring book being filled in. It’s an apartment, Mal thinks, the kind you rent when you’re a student and you’ll take the peeling wall paint and worn carpet and broken heater over the prospect of another year in the dorms. There’s a small window. It’s raining outside.

Dom looks pleased, wanders over to look out the window. “This is actually very—”

The apartment collapses around them like a house of cards, the scene bleeding back to white.

“ _Shit_ ,” says Arthur.

“Well,” Dom says after a moment, kindly. “It was a good try.”

 

 

+

 

 

Eames is sitting up on the lab bench, playing some bastardized version of solitaire, when they wake up.

“Morning,” he says, slides it towards Dom. He looks curiously at Arthur, doesn’t look at Mal at all.

“You’re here, good,” Dom says, takes his IV out and slaps a band-aid on his arm. “Arthur, this is—”

“Eames, right?” Arthur asks, sits up, the IV winding around his wrist. “You’re the forger.”

Eames flips over a card. “And you must be Lieutenant Arthur.”

“Just ‘Arthur’,” Arthur says absently, and then – “Are you actually cheating at solitaire?”

Eames looks at him, considering, and then says, guarded, “It depends on your definition of cheating. If cheating means that I’m not exactly obeying the formally set-out rules of the game, then, yes, I’m cheating. On the other hand,” he says, and flips over a card, moves it to another pile. “If you let yourself be flexible with the rules and say that cheating is putting someone else at disadvantage in order put yourself at an advantage – then, no, I’m not, because this is just leveling the playing field.” He draws a card from the deck. It’s the queen of spades, her mouth tilted flirtatiously up at him, her fingers laced primly together. Eames smiles, a little rueful. “Well,” he says, “shit.”

Arthur grins, charmed, and Mal thinks that this is probably exactly how Eames wanted it to go.

“I hope you’re better at forging than you are at playing cards, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says.

“Lucky for your military, Lieutenant,” Eames says, slides off the lab bench and picks up an IV, “I am.”

 

 

+

 

 

“You two,” Dom says, starting the car, “ _are terrible people_.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mal says, earnest. “I didn’t say anything—”

“Yeah, about that,” Dom says. “Pretending Arthur isn’t there won’t actually make him go away, Mal.”

“It might,” Mal says, low, and rolls down her window; it’s stuffy in here, she thinks.

“And _you_ ,” Dom says, and puts on the right-turn signal.

“I haven’t done anything,” Eames says, sounding startled. He’s texting someone. Some girl, maybe.

“Not yet,” Dom says darkly. “But don’t think I’m unaware of the fact that you always take Mal’s side.”

“That’s not true,” Mal says, but Eames is overlapping her,

“I don’t mind him,” casual, and maybe even a little cold.

“Really,” says Dom, skeptical.

“Really,” says Eames, and then talks Dom into picking up a pizza on the way home. With pineapple, he says, and looks shamelessly pleased when Dom actually turns around, horrified. Let me explain something to you, Dom says, namely the fact that pizza should not have fruit on it, Eames, Christ, and Eames says, oh, but _breakfast food_ is okay? Bacon is not just breakfast food, Dom says, offended, it is a way of life, and they compromise by getting one-third of their pizza topped with pineapple, one-third with bacon, and one-third left plain, because Mal happens to hate both pineapple and bacon.

After dinner, Dom has a terrible coughing fit and goes upstairs to find the cough syrup. Eames silently helps her clean up, takes the pizza box outside to throw in the garbage, and then comes back inside, watches her scrub at a spot on the table where the tomato sauce has gone dry. Is this how it’s going to be from now on, she wonders, and tries not to think of the shower she took at three-thirty in the morning, going through three rounds of body wash and brushing her teeth until her gums felt sore. It’s not – guilt, exactly, except, no, it is guilt, and she can manage it for most of the day, like a low tide kept at bay, pooling around your ankles but not a threat. She can come down to breakfast after Eames has already left to catch the bus, can work longer hours, but the thing is that there are moments like this, at night, and it’s sort of hilarious, she thinks, the comedy of loving so hard that you end up hating yourself.

“What now?” Eames says finally.

“Now you go to bed,” Mal says, trying for bright and failing miserably.

Eames nods, tight. “So, that’s it. We’re just going to go back to pretending—”

“I’m not pretending,” she says, and scrubs hard at a spot that isn’t actually there. “I’m being realistic. I love Dom and one day soon Dom is going to figure out how to stabilize a dream within a dream and the military is going to buy out his technology so we can stop having to take out loans to pay off our loans. We’ll have children and we’ll grow old and maybe you’ll visit us every year at Christmas, but that’s it, because you’ll have your life and maybe you’ll meet a girl in college and—”

Eames laughs, the ends curling up, mean. “Mal, this isn’t just going to go _away_ , I’m in _l_ —”

“Don’t,” Mal says, and feels too tired to be anything else. “You don’t even know what love _is_ , Eames.”

“Because I’m just a kid, right?” Eames says, sharp. “Yeah, I couldn’t _possibly_ —”

“What do you think is going to happen here?” she asks. “We’re going to run away together—”

“ _No_ ,” says Eames, looking sick. “I don’t – I don’t know. I just want to stop _feeling like this_.”

And Mal stares at him, thinks, how selfish I’ve been, because she’s struggled with what this means to _her_ , but it isn’t about only her, is it, it’s about her and _Eames_. And it’s her fault, it’s automatically her fault, because Eames is _seventeen_ , and everything seems so dramatic at seventeen, like one octave stretched into three. Falling in love at seventeen is wild and unpredictable and reckless and earth-shattering and heartbreaking, is like madness and hysteria. It’s like undiscovered territory, greedy kisses, and soft touches, wanting without limit because when you’re seventeen you don’t know any limits. _Eames_ , she thinks, Eames, who has felt what Mal feels for _months_ , except bigger and more terrifying, and she thinks of last night, thinks of how he’d looked when she’d pulled away, how desperate he’d sounded when he’d murmured, stay, and how Mal had left anyway.

Mal says quietly, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Eames tries a smile out, and Mal wonders if this is how they break.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, me too.”

 

 

+

 

 

May is like rewinding an entire year.

It should be better now, she thinks, because the military is funding their research and Dom is happier, carts the PASIV device around like he’s besotted with it. The bills get paid and there’s enough left over that they can afford to reconnect the Internet. You’re not going to quit your job at the museum? Dom asks, twirling a forkful of lo mein, and Mal shrugs, says, I like working there, because she does, likes sorting through the archives and the way the art is just art, how it lies flat under her hands. Okay, says Dom, cheerful, and she kisses him, says anxiously, you’re happy now, right, and Dom smiles at her, her face framed in his hands, and says, I was always happy.

Arthur starts to fit in, and that’s fine too, Mal thinks. Dom brings him home for dinner sometimes, like a stray dog scampering after a bit of kindness. He talks to Dom a lot and not at all to Mal, probably because every conversation you have devolves into you telling him that he has no imagination, Dom informs her. That’s because he has no imagination, Mal explains, and then feels embarrassed when Dom finishes loading the dishwasher and says quietly, he’s a good kid, Mal. She tries to be kinder to him after that, but it’s no use, really, and she always ends up saying something wrong. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself as Arthur’s buildings collapse around them yet again. Arthur’s nothing like Eames, isn’t permanent.

So, it’s normal, mostly, except for little things, like when Eames learns how to make origami owls and starts to leave those around the house instead of the cranes. She finds one sitting on her pillow, touches a delicate wing, and then shuts the bedroom door and unfolds it. She looks for a message, a drawing, something, but it turns out to be just a plain white piece of paper, and she wonders why she’d ever thought it would be anything else. Okay, she thinks, okay, tries to fold it back up and makes a mess of it, ends up having to throw it in the trash. It’s just little things like Eames pointedly not leaning against her when he could, Mal reaching for Dom’s hand where she’d used to reach for Eames’. It’s uncomfortably familiar, that same flare of jealousy all over again when they’re watching a movie and Eames deliberately walks all the way around the room so that he can sit next to Dom. It feels like it’s May of last year, feels like they’re back at the beginning, like Mal’s taken a pen and stricken a dark, jagged line through the last twelve months, like they never happened at all.

Eames starts staying out later as the school year winds down, one or two nights a week. She’s up late one night, pretending she’s not waiting for him, and when he comes in, he doesn’t smell like smoke or alcohol, just smells like sharp spring air. She watches him pour a glass of water, watches his throat shift as he drinks, and can’t help but ask, were you – with a girl? Eames puts his glass down; the light prisms through it, thrown into crystals, and he only sounds a little bitter when he asks tiredly, does it matter, and all Mal can say to that is, no, I suppose it doesn’t. She waits until she hears his door shut upstairs and then she sits on the couch and watches three infomercials in a row. It’s six in the morning when Dom finds her, gently coaxes her upstairs and tucks her into bed. What were you doing up so late, he asks, amused, and Mal is confused enough to say, I was waiting. For what? Dom asks, kisses her forehead, and Mal sighs, turns her face away. For the train, she says, and Dom kisses her eyelid, the curve of her cheek, murmurs, go to sleep, sweetheart, and she does. When she wakes up, she doesn’t remember any of it.

  


  


+

  


  


In June, Eames’ school lets out for vacation and the summer doldrums catch up with all of them. Eames spends his days mostly out of the house and Mal thinks she knows why, sees Eames looking when the strap of her sundress slips a little off her shoulder. He has friends, and she doesn’t know why that makes her incredibly sad, but it does when she catches glimpses of them through the window, their horrible polo shirts and a shiny red car, a girl who deliberately slings Eames’ arm around her bare shoulders, leans against him. The car disappears around the corner, leaving a ribbon of shitty rap music behind, and Mal thinks she should feel guilty or jealous, but mostly she just feels forgotten.

Dom brings the PASIV device home and Arthur along with it, and Mal lets herself be talked into dreaming two, three times a day, for hours on end. They spend mornings in Arthur’s oblivion – an apartment, a dorm room, and a high school classroom all collapsing around them in neat succession – and afternoons in San Francisco, if Dom’s dreaming, and in New York, if it’s Mal’s dream. She doesn’t take them to Paris, and when Dom asks why, she shrugs, says, Eames isn’t here, and Dom’s face goes oddly serious, like he’s trying to remember something he once knew, but then the moment is gone and he has his hand curved around her cheek, is kissing her slow and deep, like he’s asking her a question she doesn’t know the answer to.

Eames drags the PASIV device up to his room at night, and Mal tells herself that he’s just practicing forgery. She looks in on him once, cracks open his door and wonders who he’s forging, if he’s forging at all. It’s tempting, she thinks; she could just lie down next to him and it wouldn’t be real, would only be a dream, but then she thinks of how it went in reality, how Eames had said, wretched, _you won’t even look at me_ , and, worse, _I just want to stop feeling like this_ , so she shuts Eames’ bedroom door and climbs into bed with Dom, falls asleep to the tuneless melody of his soft snores.

She wakes up early in the morning to find Eames already sitting at the table, staring blankly into his coffee cup. The coffee’s black, the way he always drinks it when Mal’s not around, and she wants to pour him another cup, add milk and three sugars even though he pretends he only wants one. It would be just like this, she thinks, if she’d never known Dom. Maybe she’d be in grad school and there would be a summer in London. Maybe Eames would try to pick her pocket, maybe he’d get away and then feel bad about it because he liked the sound of her name or the picture on her driver’s license, and maybe he’d track her down, give her wallet back. Maybe she’d laugh, startled, or maybe she’d try to hit him with her purse; maybe he’d like the way she swore at him in French and maybe he would grab her wrist and maybe they’d both go still, for just one moment. And maybe she’d kiss him in a crowded train station and maybe he’d follow her back to the States; maybe they would’ve fallen in love, just like this, Mal pouring Eames a cup of coffee and Eames tilting his face up for a kiss, easy, the easiest thing in the world.

Maybe, Mal thinks, and shuts her eyes. Except that’s not how it went.

“Are you busy this morning?” Mal asks, tentative, and hates that she feels tentative.

Eames looks at her. “Why?” he asks.

Mal pours a cup of coffee, overly careful. “I miss dreaming with you,” she admits, and it feels like another confession, made worse by how quiet the house is. Arthur is sleeping in the living room, his face tucked into the sofa cushion, and Dom is upstairs, arms windmilled out, taking up four-fifths of the bed. And Mal feels like she knows a story and there’s no one to tell, because how do you fix something that is irreparably broken, she wants to ask, and who was it that you dreamed about last night?

“I miss you so much,” she says, and then, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

He’s silent for a long moment, and Mal thinks of that girl he’d kissed against the chain link fence, the girl in the car, how he comes home late on these summer nights, sleeves rolled up, buttons undone.

“I should,” Mal says, and feels flustered, snatches up her coffee cup. “Right, I’m going to—”

“I want to,” Eames says, and when she looks at him, he looks uncertain. Seventeen, she thinks automatically, but that’s not true anymore, because in two weeks he’ll be eighteen. And what then, she wonders, and answers her own question like she’s rattling out her multiplication tables: nothing.

“So come,” Mal says, like it’s as simple as that. “It’s Arthur’s dream, which means it’ll only last—”

“Mal,” Eames says, but he’s smiling, and she thinks, there we go.

“—for five minutes, anyway,” Mal finishes, laughs even as Eames throws a balled up napkin at her.

“You’re a menace,” he says.

“Say you’ll come,” she says, already imagining the stained glass windows, the flying buttresses.

“All right,” Eames says, ducks his head a bit, and Mal feels helplessly fond, feels like something that had gone missing has just slotted back into place. She reaches out to – she doesn’t know – smooth his hair back or squeeze his shoulder or something, but Eames catches her hand, his palm sliding to fit against hers. “Hey,” Eames says shyly. She can see the soft shadow of his lashes against his cheek. “I missed you too,” he says, and Mal wants to say something light here, like, of course you did, but Eames’ face is wide open, and Mal has messed up so many of these moments that she’s determined to do right by this one.

“Let me get you sugar for your coffee,” she says.

“Just one,” Eames says, like he always does.

“Sure,” Mal says, and then adds three, just like she always does.

They’re sitting at the table, arguing amiably over the crossword puzzle in the newspaper – Eames trying to insert an extra _u_ to any word that he feels warrants it and Mal skipping around, answering clues in no discernable order – when Arthur wanders in, wearing a pair of pajama pants that Eames outgrew three days after Mal had bought them for him. “Cobb’s setting up the PASIV device in the living room,” Arthur says, watching Eames try to shorten _serendipity_ by four letters. “Are you guys coming?”

“Yeah,” Mal says, and rests her wrist on Eames’ shoulder, marvels at the easy way he lets her. “We are.”

 

 

+

 

 

Arthur dreams up a cramped city park that awkwardly juts into a lake on the north side while the east looks out over the Seattle skyline, a jumble of skyscrapers and the Space Needle standing a little ways apart from downtown, looking lonely, framed by blue skies. There’s a bizarre assortment of gas towers that have fallen into disuse, but they pick up color from the sun, gleam red like they’re burning. Dom wanders around the gas plant, rambling on about gasification because of course Dom knows how gasification works, and Eames and Arthur listen for approximately five minutes before growing bored. Mal goes and rescues them after a while, tucks her hand into the crook of Dom’s elbow, says very seriously, this is so _fascinating_ , tell me more about combustion, and – what was it again? Pyrolysis, Dom says with the drollness of one who is quite aware he’s being mocked, but he lets Mal lead him over to a tree, sprawls out on his back alongside her, their fingertips just barely touching.

Mal feels good, the sunlight peeking through the latticework of branches above, the grass lush but dry under her cheek. Dom is gently combing his hand through her hair, apparently having forgiven her for her mocking, and she focuses on him, kisses his ink-stained palm, the curve of his jaw. Eames and Arthur are kicking a soccer ball around and she very carefully doesn’t notice the way Eames turns around to look at her every so often, like he can’t help himself. In love, she thinks; Eames is in love with her, and it’s ridiculous, how new the thought is. She’s been so worried about her being in love with Eames, that she’s never stopped to think about it in reverse.

“I can hear you thinking very serious thoughts,” Dom says, kissing her shoulder.

“I’m not,” Mal says. “Just. I thought it always rained in Seattle.”

Arthur shouldn’t be able to hear her, is far enough away that she loses the details of him in the sunlight. He’s just a silhouette against the city skyline, waiting for Eames to pass him the ball. But it’s his dream, and the only people who respect physics are physicists, so her voice carries far enough that he looks over his shoulder, slants a wry smile at her. “It does – unless you put a little imagination into it.”

Dom’s practically radiating smugness. She ignores him and just says evenly, “Well done, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cobb,” Arthur says, sounding amused, and Dom laughs, lays a kiss to her forehead.

“That was hard for you, wasn’t it,” he murmurs.

“It really was,” she says, a little pathetically.

“This one’s not going to collapse, you know,” Dom adds blithely.

“I _know_ ,” she says, turning her face into his shoulder so that she doesn’t have to watch him laugh.

Arthur’s dreams, Mal muses, are as meticulous and organized as Arthur is, with his neat handwriting and the careful way he actually takes notes when Dom launches into a lecture about the psychology of dreaming. In Mal’s dreams, time is an inconstant, flighty thing: she can dream nights that go on for weeks, three sunsets in a row. Dom never bothers with time either; his New York is like a still capture taken out of a film reel, stuck in April, right when the cherry blossoms begin to bloom. Arthur’s dreams, though, are almost absurdly linear. Mal watches the shadows shift, the sun slowly drift across the sky, the gas towers gleam bright red and then mute into a darker, burnished brown. Dom falls asleep at some point, his fingers curling a little, breaths lengthening out. Arthur dreams the soccer ball into a Frisbee, which Eames dreams into a baseball, which Arthur dreams into a football, which Eames shamelessly dreams back into a soccer ball. Their faces are flushed pink in the four o’clock Seattle sunlight and Mal is trying to calculate how much longer they have in the dream when Eames notices a few kids standing on a hill, their heads tilted towards colorful shapes in the sky.

“My sister and I used to come out here when the wind was good,” Arthur says, shading his eyes with his hand. “We must’ve gone through hundreds of kites by the time I was twelve.”

“I’ve never flown one,” Eames says, a little wistful, and Arthur grins, dreams the soccer ball at his feet into a plain red kite. No imagination, Mal thinks, and wishes Dom were awake to see this, because all the kites in the sky are plain smears of colors, reds and blues and yellows, none of the shapes she used to fly as a child – dragons and butterflies and eagles, streamers that doubled as feathers or fish scales.

Arthur bends down, picks up the kite. “Come on,” he says.

“You’re joking,” Eames says, trying for supercilious and only managing to sound pleased.

Arthur asks very seriously, “Are you worried that the five-year-old projections will be better than you?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Eames says, but he snatches the kite out of Arthur’s hands and starts to run towards the hill. Mal sits up and watches them go, the kite blurring in Eames’ hold from plain red to something more majestic – a macaw, maybe, the tail made up of vivid yellows and saturated blues. Arthur catches up to him about halfway up the hill, and they stand together for a moment, their heads bent over the kite, Eames nodding along as Arthur explains something – aerodynamics, probably, forgetting that it’s his dream and that if he wants the kite to fly, it will. They look so young together, Mal thinks, Arthur, who sheds a little bit of his military severity with each day, and Eames, whose smiles are always unexpectedly bright, unexpectedly sweet. They’re good for each other, she decides, watches Arthur take the kite and walk backwards, Eames unwinding the line. She tries to listen for Arthur’s voice but this isn’t Mal’s dream, and she only hears what she’s meant to. She watches Eames run, watches the kite string up into the sky, falling and soaring and falling and soaring, somehow never tangling with all the other ones, flying, flying.

The dream’s going to end soon, she thinks, and even as she thinks it, Mal closes her eyes and wakes up.

 

 

+


End file.
